All-silicon nonlinear transmission line using optimized Schottky diodes

Nonlinear Transmission Lines (NLTL) have been fabricated so far on GaAs substrates only. Recently, we were able to demonstrate a working nonlinear transmission line for the first time on high resistivity silicon proving the applicability of the NLTL concept to silicon millimeter wave integrated circuits (SIMMWICS). We have significantly improved our previous results by using optimized Schottky varactors. The falltime of 74 ps of a 4 GHz sine wave was compressed to 15 ps at the output of the NLTL, doubling the equivalent bandwidth of our first result.