Room-temperature terahertz oscillation of resonant tunneling diodes

Our recent results of room-temperature THz oscillators using resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) are reported. This oscillator is composed of a GaInAs/AlAs double-barrier RTD and a planar slot antenna. The maximum oscillation frequency in RTDs is limited by the electron delay time across the RTD layers, which consists of the dwell time in the resonant tunneling region and the transit time across the collector depletion region. The dwell time was reduced by a narrow quantum well, and a fundamental oscillation up to 1.31 THz with the output power of 10 μW was achieved at room temperature. Further increase in oscillation frequency is expected by optimized size and materials of the well and barriers for the dwell time and those of the collector depletion layer for the transit time. By these improvements, a fundamental oscillation up to around 2 THz is theoretically possible. For high output power, coherent power combining was demonstrated in a two-element array with offset slot antennas coupled with each other, and 610 μW at 620 GHz was obtained. Spectral characteristics were measured with a heterodyne detection, and the linewidth of less than 10 MHz was obtained. A frequency change of 1-5 % with bias voltage was also observed, which is attributed to the bias-dependent dwell time. Direct intensity modulation and wireless data transmission were demonstrated. A transmission rate of 3 Gbps with the bit error rate of 3×10-5 was obtained at 540 GHz in a preliminary experiment, which is limited by the frequency characteristics of external modulation circuits at present.