A single-chip integrated transceiver for high field NMR magnetometry

Marco Grisi; Gaurasundar Marc Conley; Pascal Sommer; Jacques Tinembart; Giovanni Boero

doi:10.1063/1.5066436

A single-chip integrated transceiver for high field NMR magnetometry

Rev Sci Instrum. 2019 Jan;90(1):015001. doi: 10.1063/1.5066436.

Authors

Marco Grisi¹, Gaurasundar Marc Conley¹, Pascal Sommer², Jacques Tinembart², Giovanni Boero¹

Affiliations

¹ École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
² Metrolab Technology SA, CH-1228 Plan-les-Ouates, Switzerland.

PMID: 30709227
DOI: 10.1063/1.5066436

Abstract

We present the design and performance of a broad-band single-chip integrated transceiver specifically conceived for nuclear magnetic resonance magnetometry. The single-chip transceiver is realized using a standard silicon complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor integrated circuit technology. A radio-frequency (RF) transmit amplifier, a transmit/receive switch, a low noise RF receive amplifier, a quadrature (IQ)-mixer, and two intermediate frequency amplifiers are integrated on a single silicon chip of 1.8 mm². The advantages and problematic aspects with respect to conventional discrete electronic approaches are discussed. We show the results of magnetic field measurements performed at 1.4 and 7.05 T, using solid and liquid samples having volumes from 40 μl down to 100 pl. Particular attention is devoted to the comparison of the experimentally measured magnetic field standard deviation with respect to the Cramer-Rao lower bound value. With a sample of distilled water (T₁ ≅ T₂ ≅ 3 s, T₂ ^*≅ 20 ms) having a volume of 40 μl, a standard deviation of 2.5 nT at 7.05 T (i.e., 0.5 ppb) in 1 s of averaging time is achieved, with a projected Cramer-Rao lower bond of 8 pT (i.e., 1.1 ppt).