Experimental and theoretical investigation of the DC and high-frequency characteristics of the negative differential resistance in pseudomorphic AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs MODFET´s

The authors investigated the negative differential resistance (NDR) in the I-V characteristics of pseudomorphic AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs modulation doped field-effect transistors (MODFETs) with gate lengths of 0.3 μm. They experimentally verified the existence of abrupt multiple NDR in both the input circuit and the output circuit. The NDR occurs over a short range of drain voltage (less than 200 mV) and gate voltage (less than 5 mV) for NDR induced by thermionic emission. The authors provide a general interpretation of the measured DC results based on tunneling real-space transfer (TRST) which occurs because of the formation of hybrid excited states across the InGaAs channel and AlGaAs donor layer. The existence of stable reflection is verified in both the input and output circuits with stable broadband frequency response in the output circuit to at least 49 GHz. These results show that NDR via TRST in pseudomorphic MODFETs can provide wideband frequency response not limited by the electron transit time from source to drain