Developments in integrated circuits and transistors for millimetre wave systems

The author presents an overview of developments in millimetre wave integrated circuits and transistors for both military and commercial systems. Many transistor structures are available in many semiconductor material systems; metal semiconductor field effect transistors, modulation doped field effect transistors, heterojunction bipolar transistors, metal insulator semiconductor field effect transistors, permeable base transistors, resonant tunneling hot electron transistors etc. However, the first three types are the most important and, using them selectively, it is possible to obtain low noise temperatures, `power´ amplification, oscillators with low phase noise, and high integration. The author discusses these topics and provides various graphs to illustrate some of the points raised