Challenges and prospects of RF oscillators using silicon resonant tunneling diodes

Advanced SOI and strained-SOI (s-SOI) technologies may be an alternative option to integrate Resonant Tunneling Diodes (RTD) in a silicon process. To investigate the expected performances of such technologies, a complete DC and AC compact model of silicon RTD has been proposed, and implemented in a circuit simulator. RTD based RF oscillators have been simulated and compared to more conventional silicon circuits. Even if SOI based RTD offers lower performances than their III-V counterparts, it turns out that extremely low power RF oscillator at 20 GHz can be realized on silicon using this technology.

[1]  Analytical modeling of tunneling current through SiO2–HfO2 stacks in metal oxide semiconductor structures , 2009 .

[2]  M. Vinet,et al.  Bonded planar double-metal-gate NMOS transistors down to 10 nm , 2005, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[3]  E. Linfield,et al.  Electron reflection and interference in the GaAs/AlAs-Al Schottky collector resonant-tunneling diode , 1998 .

[4]  P. Chahal,et al.  Unified AC model for the resonant tunneling diode , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices.

[5]  Hiroshi Okazaki,et al.  A novel oscillation circuit using a resonant-tunneling diode , 2005, 2005 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[6]  L. Esaki,et al.  Tunneling in a finite superlattice , 1973 .

[7]  B. Majkusiak.  Resonant Tunneling Devices on SOI Basis , 2007 .

[8]  Jen-Inn Chyi,et al.  AlN/GaN double-barrier resonant tunneling diodes grown by rf-plasma-assisted molecular-beam epitaxy , 2002 .

[9]  Gabriel M. Crean,et al.  n-type Si/SiGe resonant tunnelling diodes , 2002 .

[10]  Serge Luryi,et al.  Nonclassical devices in SOI: Genuine or copyright from III-V , 2007 .

[11]  Mingquan Bao,et al.  A 21.5/43-GHz dual-frequency balanced Colpitts VCO in SiGe technology , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.

[12]  H.J. De Los Santos,et al.  An efficient HBT/RTD oscillator for wireless applications , 2001, IEEE Microwave and Wireless Components Letters.

[13]  K.T. Kornegay,et al.  A 25-GHz emitter degenerated LC VCO , 2004, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.