A novel method for measuring the four noise parameters of a field-effect transistor (FET) is presented. It is based on the determination of its intrinsic noise matrix elements [C11INT, C22INT, Re(C12 INT), Im(C12INT)] by fitting the measured device noise figure for a matched source reflection coefficient (F50) at a number of frequency points, thus, a tuner is not required. In contrast to previous works, no restrictive assumptions are made on the intrinsic noise sources. The receiver full-noise calibration is easily performed by using a set of coaxial and on-wafer standards that are commonly available in a microwave laboratory, thus, an expensive broad-band tuner is not required for calibration either. On-wafer experimental verification up to 26 GHz is presented and a comparison with other F50-based and tuner-based methods is given. As an application, the dependence of the FET intrinsic noise sources as a function of the bias drain-current and gate-length is obtained.

Peer Reviewed