Design and manufacture of planar GaAs Gunn diode for millimeter wave application

GaAs-based planar Gunn diodes with AlGaAs hot electron injector have been successfully developed to be used as a local oscillator of 76 GHz in monolithic millimeter-wave integrated circuits. We designed two kinds of structure diode, one has a fixed distance between the anode and cathode, but has variational cathode area, the other has a fixed cathode area, but has different distances between two electrodes. The fabrication of Gunn diode is performed in accordance with the order of operations: cathode defining, mesa etching, anode defining, isolation, passivation, via hole and electroplating. A peak current density of 29.5 kA/cm² is obtained. And the characteristics of negative differential resistance and the asymmetry of the current–voltage curve due to the AlGaAs hot electron injector are discussed in detail. It is demonstrated that the smaller size of active area corresponds to the smaller current, and the shorter distance between anode and cathode also corresponds to the lower threshold voltage and higher peak current, and hot electron injector can effectively enhance the radio frequency conversion efficiency and output power.