New Modes of Operation for Avalanche Diodes: Frequency Multiplication and Upconversion

The Investigation of W Band Microstrip Integrated High Order Frequency Multiplier Based on the Nonlinear Model of Avalanche Diode

“…1: (1) the narrow avalanche area, where the electric field is strong enough to cause carriers avalanche multiplication by impact ionization [14,24,25]; (2) the drift area, where no carriers are generated and carriers travel at their saturated velocities; (3) the inactive area which presents the undesirable parasitic resistance of avalanche diode [26].…”

“…To people's interest, the rich high order harmonics character of avalanche diode with very low parasitic resistance in millimeter wave range render itself very suitable to achieve high order frequency multiplier in a single stage at millimeter wave band [14,15]. Avalanche diode high order multiplier has achieved excellent performance from 30 GHz to 140 GHz and it has been successfully used in millimeter wave radar tansceiver and measurement equipments [16][17][18].…”

The Research of W-Band High Order Frequency Multiplier Based on Avalanche Diode

“…The dynamic operating characteristic of avalanche diode can be best understood by dividing the active zone of the device into two parts: (1) the avalanche area, where the electric field is strong enough to cause carriers avalanche multiplication, and it behaves as a nonlinear inductor from the analysis of Read's equation [16,25,26]; (2) the drift area, where no carriers are generated, and carriers travel at their saturated velocities. In the avalanche breakdown process of avalanche area, carrier ionization rate is the sensitive nonlinear function of electric field.…”

“…Taking advantage of the fierce inductive nonlinearity in avalanche effects, avalanche diode could generate high order harmonics up to short millimeter wave band with effective harmonic power in a single stage [16], which implies that avalanche diode could translate high stable microwave reference source into millimeter wave band without additional amplification [17,18]. Good performance of the avalanche diode high order multiplier have been achieved in millimeter wave band [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24].…”

“…Initial research has demonstrated that the high nonlinearity of avalanche effects plays an important role in high order frequency multiplication [16,[22][23][24]. Later the modulation effect of external injected RF field to avalanche current nonlinearity is analyzed [20].…”