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We report on the design, fabrication and characterisation of large-area photoconductive THz array structures, consisting of a thin LT-GaAs active region transferred to an insulating substrate using a wafer-scale bonding process. The electrically insulating, transparent substrate reduces the parasitic currents in the devices, allowing peak THz-fields as high as 120 kV cm−1 to be generated over a bandwidth >5 THz. These results are achieved using lower pulse energies than demanded by conventional photoconductive arrays and other popular methods of generating high-field THz radiation. Two device sizes are fully characterised and the emission properties are compared to generation by optical rectification in ZnTe. The device can be operated in an optically saturated regime in order to suppress laser noise.

This paper presents a comprehensive study of the optical and electrical dielectric material properties of six commonly-used silicon and glass substrates at terahertz (THz) frequencies, including refractive index, absorption coefficient, dielectric constant and loss factor. The material characterization techniques used in this paper feature THz time-domain transmission and reflection spectroscopy with the measurement frequencies from 0.5 THz up to a maximum of 6.5 THz. Of the six selected dielectric and semiconductor substrates, two are silicon wafers with resistivities ranging from 0.001 to 0.02 Ω-cm. From the measurement results, loss tangents of the selected silicon wafers range from 0.680 to 5.455 and the dielectric constants are from 1.079 to 17.735. The four other wafers are all glass-based substrates: D263 glass, Borofloat 33 glass, fused silica and Sapphire. From the measurements, it is found that the THz dielectric properties vary considerably between the substrate samples e.g. dielectric constants range from 1.925 to 3.207 while loss tangents are from 0.042 × 10−3 to 0.127. Most of the selected silicon and glass-based substrates are quite useful for many THz applications, e.g., THz integrated circuits (THz ICs), THz microsystem technologies (THz MSTs) and THz system-on-a-chip (THz SoC) and system-on-substrate (SiP).

We report on the development of a large-area photoconductive THz array structure with an LT-GaAs active region fabricated on quartz substrates using a BCB bonding process. These are shown to generate high THz-fields greater than 100kV/cm, with a bandwidth greater than 6 THz.

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