A Fully-Integrated CMOS System-on-Chip Ku Band Radiometer System for Remote Sensing of Snow and Ice

This paper presents a fully integrated single-chip Ku-band radiometer system for snow and ice sensing in 65nm CMOS. The single chip contains the Ku receiver chain, synthesizer, analog-to-digital converter (ADC), digital signal processing (DSP), digital calibration, and a USB interface to form a complete sensing system requiring only a single external MMIC LNA preamplifier. The entire radiometer system consumes 485mW including the external MMIC and achieves a measured NE Delta T of 1.64K with an Allan deviation time of 1.5 seconds.