A 5–300MHz CMOS transceiver for multi-nuclear NMR spectroscopy

Abstract

This paper presents a 5-300MHz multi-nuclei NMR transceiver designed with spectroscopy for drug discovery in mind. The overall transceiver (transmitter and receiver), is implemented in 130nm CMOS, occupies an active area of 2mm2 and consumes 12mA from a 1.5V supply. The measured phase noise for the on-chip frequency synthesizer is -110dBc at 10KHz offset when the LO frequency is 212.966MHz (~1H Larmor frequency at 5T). The measured input referred noise floor for the overall receiver is 3.5nV/√Hz. The receiver NMR functionality was validated using a variety of chemical samples, including adenosine triphosphaste(ATP), benzene(C6H6) and ethanol(CH3CH2OH) in a 5T magnet. Full transceiver NMR functionality, including that of of the internal power amplifier, was validated with the help of a 0.3mL H2O sample.