Challenges and prospects of RF oscillators using silicon resonant tunneling diodes

Advanced SOI and strained-SOI (s-SOI) technologies may be an alternative option to integrate resonant tunneling diodes (RTD) in a silicon process. To investigate the expected performances of such technologies, a complete DC and AC compact model of silicon RTD has been proposed, and implemented in a circuit simulator. RTD based RF oscillators have been simulated and compared to more conventional silicon circuits. Even if SOI based RTD offers lower performances than their III-V counterparts, it turns out that extremely low power RF oscillator at 20 GHz can be realized on silicon using this technology.