Performance enhancement of CMOS terahertz detector by drain current

In this paper, we study the effect of the drain current on terahertz detection for Si metal-oxide semiconductor fieldeffect transistors(MOSFETs) both theoretically and experimentally. The analytical model, which is based on the smallsignal equivalent circuit of MOSFETs, predicts the significant improvement of the voltage responsivity Rv with the bias current. The experiment on antennas integrated with MOSFETs agrees with the analytical model, but the Rv improvement is accompanied first by a decrease, then an increase of the low-noise equivalent power(NEP) with the applied current. We determine the tradeoff between the low-NEP and high-Rv for the current-biased detectors. As the best-case scenario, we obtained an improvement of about six times in Rv without the cost of a higher NEP. We conclude that the current supply scheme can provide high-quality signal amplification in practical CMOS terahertz detection.