Resonant Tunnelling Optoelectronic Circuits

Abstract

Abstract. We introduce and report recent developments on a novel five port optoelectronic voltage controlled oscillator consisting of a resonant tunneling diode (RTD) optical-waveguide integrated with a laser diode. The RTD-based optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) has both optical and electrical input and output ports, with the fifth port allowing voltage control. The RTD-OEO locks to reference radio-frequency (RF) sources by either optical or electrical injection locking techniques allowing remote synchronization, eliminating the need of impedance matching between traditional RF oscillators. RTD-OEO functions include generation, amplification and distribution of RF carriers, clock recovery, carrier recovery, modulation and demodulation and frequency synthesis. Self-injection locking operation modes, where small portions of the output electrical/optical signals are fed back into the electrical/optical input ports, are also proposed. The self-phase locked loop configuration can give rise to low-noise high-stable oscillations, not limited by the RF source performance and with no need of external optoelectronic conversion.

Optoelectronic Oscillators for Communication Systems

“…The electrical and optical input ports act as injection ports to lock, optically or electrically, the OEO to reference sources. For detailed information on the RTD and LD, see [3] and [7]. This five port RTD based OEO circuit eliminates the need of discrete components such as RF amplifiers, RF couplers and filters, and corresponds to a significant simplification when compared to previously reported optoelectronic oscillators [8,9,12].…”

Resonant tunneling diode as high speed optical/electronic transmitter

“…As RTD devices exhibit negative differential conductance (NDC) gain over a wide bandwidth, the RTD-PD device would act as optical receiver with a build in amplifier, and which can convert a modulated optical signal into the wireless domain [6,7]. Different from RTD device layer structure, the RTD-PD structure includes a photo-absorption layer as shown in Table II.…”

Resonant tunnelling diode based high speed optoelectronic transmitters

“…As RTD devices exhibit negative differential conductance (NDC) gain over extra wide bandwidth, the RTD-PD device would act as optical receiver with a build in amplifier, which can extract from the optical modulated signal to the RF carriers and amplify it by using RTD as high frequency sources [3] [6]. The typical RTD device layer structure consists of a narrow band gap -quantum well material sandwiched between two wide band gap-double barrier materials, namely double barrier quantum well (DBQW) structure.…”

“…To benefit from the RTDs' capability of high frequency sources, the monolithically integration of a light sensitive layer-photo detector was introduced with RTD epi-layer design. RTD based photo-detector shows great potential applications for optical-electrical modulation and photo-detection [3]. Optimization of RTD-PD layer structures to maximize the sensitivity and responsivity is one of the key factors for real applications.…”