Terahertz Speed Ballistic Circuits for Space Applications

Abstract

The technical objective of this research grant was to establish a new discipline that we call ballistic electronics. This means an electronic technology based upon nonlinear ballistic transport and phenomena that exist in nanodevices that have the critical dimension smaller than the carrier mean-free path. Our test devices are structured in 2-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) compound semiconductor heterostructures, thus, can operate our devices in the temperature range up to the room temperature. Our experiments confirmed that our new device called ballistic deflection transistor can operate at several hundreds of gigahertz frequency at room temperature even at transistor channels larger than mena free path. As a second major achievement of this project was that we demonstrated that the BDTs can be integrated into larger circuit blocks performing dedicated functions. This opens the door to larger functions integration into terahertz speed analog and digital processing. Details of different activities and achievements are presented in the attached files.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jan 01, 2012
Accession Number
ADA563987

Entities

People

  • Martin Margala

Organizations

  • University of Massachusetts Lowell

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Advanced Electronics

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Bandwidth
  • Circuits
  • Compound Semiconductors
  • Electric Fields
  • Electron Gas
  • Electronics
  • Electrons
  • Frequency
  • Geometry
  • Logic
  • Logic Gates
  • Nand Gates
  • Semiconductors
  • Simulations
  • Transistors
  • Two Dimensional
  • Wave Propagation

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computer Science.
  • Quantum Dot Semiconductor Device Photonics and Graphene Optoelectronic Materials and THz Physics.

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics
  • Space