Yu H. Design of CMOS Millimeter-Wave and Terahertz IC with Metamaterials 2015

Textbook in PDF format

Terahertz (THz) radiation (0.1 ∼ 30 THz) fills the gap between electronics and photonics with unique spectroscopic and communication properties. A great
deal of attention has been paid to THz electronic and photonics recently due to their moderate wavelengths to leverage advantages of both microwave and
optics, such as good bandwidth, spatial resolution, and penetration depth with no harmful ionization. However, the current optics-based THz systems are bulky, expensive, lack portability, and have low detection capability by electro-optic sampling techniques.
With the rapid scaling of CMOS technology, it has become feasible to realize integrated circuits with the standard CMOS process in millimeterwave (mm-wave) and even the THz frequency region toward low-cost, portable and large-arrayed systems on a chip. However, it is still challenging to deal with generation, amplification, transmission and detection of THz signals by a single CMOS transistor due to the huge substrate and path propagation loss as well as low device gain. Instead, one needs to figure out how to have a coherent design of arrayed CMOS transistors with high output power, high gain, and high sensitivity. The main point here is how to manipulate the phase of EM waves.
As such, this book shows that with the use of metamaterials, one can have coherent THz signal generation, amplification, transmission, and detection for arrayed CMOS transistors with significantly improved performance. New metamaterial-based THz imaging and communication systems have been demonstrated in CMOS as well