Ultrahigh speed resonant tunneling diode/transmission line clock generator and track-and-hold

Resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) have been successfully used for high speed trigger sources and millimeter wave oscillators. Here, two new circuits combining RTDs and transmission lines (TL) are proposed for square wave clock generation in multigigahertz high speed digital circuits and for sampling analog signals at multigigahertz clock frequency data rates as is required in analog-to-digital converters. Both circuits require picosecond slew rates. The designs presented here are free of transistors and are limited in performance only by the switching speed of the RTD and the bandwidth of the transmission line. SPICE simulations incorporating a physics-based RTD model demonstrate the potential of these circuits for track-and-hold applications.