« Development of an active load-pull characterization bench
on ST B55 technology »

The characterization of integrated devices in the millimeter frequency range (i.e., from 30 to 300 GHz) is one of the major challenges of the Si and SiGe technology today. This characterization is required to produce accurate models that can then be used for the design of circuits in this frequency domain. More accurately, in order to characterize the behavior under high power constraints of transistors and other active devices, measurements called load-pull must be conducted. In order to overcome the difficulties present in the millimeter frequency range to be able to carry out these measurements, measurement systems integrated in the chip and electrically connected to the Device Under Test are developed within the group.

The figure here shows a system to perform a load-pull analysis at 160 GHz and the associated power and phase detection. This system has been fully designed on the 55 nm SiGe BiCMOS technology from STMicroelectronics. Thus, advanced calibration algorithms are studied in order to extract accurate measurements from the DST.