Design, Fabrication and Characterisation of RTD Terahertz Oscillators

This paper presents a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) that combines two resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) in parallel. By employing appropriate circuitry and improved device epilayer design, the oscillators generate an output power of 2 mW at 84 GHz and 1 mW at 206 GHz which are the highest power reported for RTD-based oscillators in the respective frequency bands. Also, preliminary wireless communication results showed 15 Gbps and 13 Gbps data rate over tens of cm distance, which benefited from the increased transmitter power level.