A 0.3mm² Miniaturized X-Band On-Chip Slot Antenna in 0.13μm CMOS

Abstract

An on-chip miniaturized slot antenna integrated with a CMOS LNA, on the same chip, is presented in this paper. The antenna operates in the 9-10GHz frequency band, occupies a die area of only 0.3mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , and is fabricated in a standard 0.13μm RF CMOS process. A LNA implemented on the same substrate is directly matched to the antenna. An efficient shielding technique is used to shield the antenna from the low-resistivity substrate underneath it. Measurement results of the fabricated prototype indicate that the antenna shows an active gain of -4.4 dBi and an efficiency of 9% in spite of its close proximity to the lossy silicon substrate.