Shirin Montazeri

Shirin Montazeri received her Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in 2018. During her PhD, she was a Research Assistant working on low-power LNAs, RF transceivers, device modeling, and MMIC designs for radio astronomy and quantum computers. She was a recipient of the 2016 Microwave Theory and Techniques Graduate Fellowship award and the 2019 Best PhD Dissertation award. In 2018, she joined Qualcomm Technologies where she worked on the next generation of 4G/5G transceiver chips. Currently, She is a research scientist at Google Quantum AI team working on the RF/microwave integrated circuits and systems for control and readout of quantum computers. Shirin is also serving as the 2023-2025 vice-chair of the MTT-S Low Noise Techniques Technical Committee and the co-chair of the Women in Microwave (WiM) Engineering committee at the 2023 International Microwave Symposium.

Cryogenic low noise amplifiers (LNAs) are one of the key components in many emerging applications such as radio astronomy and quantum computing. For many years, the majority of cryogenic low noise amplifiers were built around InP High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMT). Recently, Silicon- Germanium (SiGe) Heterojunction Bipolar Transistors (HBTs) emerged as an attractive alternative option for the implementation of cryogenic LNAs. There have been extensive studies on the feasibility of leveraging these devices to implement cryogenic amplifiers in the past decade. The deployment of such LNAs in the future large-scale systems is contingent upon the possibility of developing LNAs with reduced DC power dissipation to enable the cooling of a large number of array elements inside a cryogenic cooler.
In this talk, we will describe the state-of-the-art in cryogenic low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), with a focus on those implemented using SiGe BiCMOS technologies. The talk will begin with a brief history and discussion of the significance of cryogenic LNAs. The physical properties of SiGe HBTs that enable their ultra-low-noise performance will be reviewed. The talk will conclude with the recent developement and the latest results of ultra-low power SiGe HBT cryogenic low noise amplifiers.