A Hybrid CMOS-InP W-Band Imaging Radiometer with Compact MetaSurface Antenna for UAV-Based Wildfire Imaging

This paper presents a CMOS W-band imaging radiometer (passive imager) for wildfire imaging from a small drone platform. To keep the instrument compact, the radiometer adopts a highly integrated approach where a CMOS System-on-chip is used to implement the radiometer electronics except for the front-end LNA implemented with InP for noise temperature purposes. The receiver is coupled with an all metal metasurface (MTS) antenna that provides low losses at W -band, maintaining radiometric sensitivity. The demonstrated radiometer offers a measured NEΔT of better than 2K with an integration time of 50 ms, while exhibiting an Allan time > 25 seconds, allowing it to operate without calibration for sensing high contrast fires. The entire module including CMOS chip, amps and support circuitry consumes only 290mW of DC power.