Breaking world records in high-speed microelectronics using resonant tunneling diodes and Schottky photodiodes

High speed microelectronics offer new devices and components which are magnitudes of order faster than the conventional ones. The introduction of faster components to systems like computers and telecommunication equipments, will mean more possibilities for scientific research and will bring enormous changes that are even hard to predict today. This thesis focuses on two of these ultra-fast devices: resonant tunneling diodes, and high-speed Schottky photodiodes. We were able to achieve world record speed performance from both of these devices.; Given the nature of the RTD material systems, we found that switching is the only practical application. We have designed and fabricated RTD's with switching times as low as 6 psec. These devices were later used as threshold detectors in trigger applications. We have monolithically integrated these devices with resistors to perform as trigger circuits and used them at operating frequencies as high as 110 GHz. This is six times higher than previously obtained with trigger circuits using Esaki tunnel diodes.; Schottky diode offers excellent high frequency performance and is used in a wide variety of applications. As high-speed photodetectors, Schottky photodiodes play an important role in optical communication and measurement systems, and have shown to have 3-dB bandwidths in excess of 100 GHz. But, as these results have been limited by the measurement techniques, we have pursued a monolithic approach to overcome measurement problems. A GaAs based all-electronic sampler is monolithically fabricated with a high-speed Schottky photodiode. Without deconvolution, we are able to measure a temporal response of 1.8 psec full width at half maximum, corresponding to a 3-dB bandwidth of 200 GHz.; Future directions for RTD's and Schottky photodiodes are also discussed. We first survey the preliminary work on RTD's which use new material systems like InP based InGaAs/InAlAs and InAs/AlSb. Later, we discuss a possible marriage of RTD's and Schottky photodiodes by replacing the nonlinear transmission line part of the photodiode/sampler circuit with a single RTD. Our early results on InGaAs based long-wavelength photodiodes are also presented.