SUPERCONDUCTING INTEGRATED RECEIVER

V. P. Koshelets

Published Jan 1, 2009• 0 citations

Abstract

A Superconducting Integrated Receiver (SIR) [1, 2] was proposed more than 10 years ago and finally has been developed for practical applications [3]. A SIR comprises in one chip (size of 4 mm*4 mm*0.5 mm) a low-noise SIS mixer with quasioptical antenna, an flux-flow oscillator (FFO) [4] acting as a Local Oscillator (LO) and a second SIS harmonic mixer (HM) for the FFO phase locking, see Fig. 1. All components of the SIR microcircuits are fabricated in a high quality Nb-AlN/NbN-Nb tri-layer on a Si substrate [5]. The receiver chip is placed on the flat back surface of the silicon lens, forming an integrated lens-antenna. Light weight and low power consumption combined with nearly quantum limited sensitivity and a wide tuning range of the FFO make SIR a perfect candidate for many practical applications. In particular we have developed integrated receiver for novel balloon borne instrument TELIS (Terahertz Limb Sounder) [6]. TELIS is a collaborative European project to build a three-channel heterodyne balloon-based spectrometer for measuring a variety of the stratosphere constituents.

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