Abstract-An on-chip fully electronic molecular clock based on sub-terahertz rotational spectroscopy

Cheng Wang, Xiang Yi, James Mawdsley, Mina Kim, Zihan Wang, Ruonan Han

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41928-018-0102-4

Mobile electronic devices require stable, portable and energy-efficient frequency references (or clocks). However, current approaches using quartz-crystal and microelectromechanical oscillators suffer from frequency drift. Recent advances in chip-scale atomic clocks, which probe the hyperfine transitions of evaporated alkali atoms, have led to devices that can overcome this issue, but their complex construction, cost and power consumption limit their broader deployment. Here we show that sub-terahertz rotational transitions of polar gaseous molecules can be used as frequency bases to create low-cost, low-power miniaturized clocks. We report two molecular clocks probing carbonyl sulfide (16O12C32S), which are based on laboratory-scale instruments and complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor chips. Compared with chip-scale atomic clocks, our approach is less sensitive to external influences and offers faster frequency error compensation, and, by eliminating the need for alkali metal evaporation, it offers faster start-up times and lower power consumption. Our work demonstrates the feasibility of monolithic integration of atomic-clock-grade frequency references in mainstream silicon-chip systems.

Abstract-Molecular Detection for Unconcentrated Gas With ppm Sensitivity Using 220-to-320-GHz Dual-Frequency-Comb Spectrometer in CMOS

Cheng Wang, Bradford Perkins, Zihan Wang, Ruonan Han,

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8331906/

Millimeter-wave/terahertz rotational spectroscopy of polar gaseous molecules provides a powerful tool for complicated gas mixture analysis. In this paper, a 220-to-320-GHz dual-frequency-comb spectrometer in 65-nm bulk CMOS is presented, along with a systematic analysis on fundamental issues of rotational spectrometer, including the impacts of various noise mechanisms, gas cell, molecular properties, detection sensitivity, etc. Our comb spectrometer, based on a high-parallelism architecture, probes gas sample with 20 comb lines simultaneously. It does not only improve the scanning speed by 20×, but also reduces the overall energy consumption to 90 mJ/point with 1 Hz bandwidth (or 0.5 s integration time). With its channelized 100-GHz scanning range and sub-kHz specificity, wide range of molecules can be detected. In the measurements, state-of-the-art total radiated power of 5.2 mW and single sideband noise figure of 14.6–19.5 dB are achieved, which further boost the scanning speed and sensitivity. Finally, spectroscopic measurements for carbonyl sulfide (OCS) and acetonitrile (CH3CN) are presented. With a path length of 70 cm and 1 Hz bandwidth, the measured minimum detectable absorption coefficient reaches αgas,min=7.2×10−7 cm−1. For OCS that enables a minimum detectable concentration of 11 ppm. The predicted sensitivity for some other molecules reaches ppm level (e.g., 3 ppm for hydrogen cyanide), or 10 ppt level if gas preconcentration with a typical gain of 105 is used.