Terahertz electronics: Opportunities, challenges and technologies

The decade of spectrum centered roughly around 1THz represents a "final frontier." Conventional semiconductor and photonics technologies seem unable to serve this spectrum well. Although scaled semiconductors deliver transistors with fmax values in the THz range, an inverse-quartic rolloff in specific output power prevents full exploitation of this spectrum. This talk will describe compelling uses of the THz band, including sensing and XWB (extreme wideband) wireless communications. How the limitations of transistor technology might be overcome by architectural innovations, as well as by new device structures will also be discussed. Exploitation of this last spectral frontier presents perhaps the greatest challenge in the history of RF technology.