Integrated Millimeter/Submillimeter Wave Receivers

"Integrated superconducting receivers look very attractive for applications where low noise, weight, power consumption and volume are required. HYPRES proposes to design such a receiver that realizes this improved performance. HYPRES will exploit itsability to produce high quality superconducting (Nb) integrated receivers. This goal will be met by incorporating on one chip such planar components as a SIS (superconductor-isolator-superconductor) mixer with quasioptical antenna, a superconducting localoscillator (LO), an intermediate frequency (IF) SQUID amplifier and the circuits for digitizing of down converted signals and their real time processing. This advanced integrated receiver will focus on digitizing wideband (~2 GHz) signals in the 0-500 GHzrange using a highly tunable long Josephson junction operating in flux-flow mode as a LO and correlator-based versatile digital signal processor circuit. These superconducting integrated circuits will be packaged on a novel cryogenic assembly mounted onsuperconductor multi-chip module (MCM). No other technology may offer this performance with this integration. This project will profit from several concurrent and past DoD-funded projects, such as the 20 GSamples/s ADC (Navy AMRF-C), the 20 Gbpssuperconducting multi-chip module technology (BMDO), the low-pass UHF multi-function digital receiver (ONR), and the 16 GHz correlator developed in BMDO STTR Phase I."