Increased interest in the millimeter region has stimulated the development of receiver technology for a wide range of applications including radio astronomy, atmospheric radiometry, plasma diagnostics, millimeter wave imaging, nondestructive testing, radar, and high- density, high-directivity communications and data transmission. To date, most of the flight- qualified production III-V compound semiconductor high-speed electronics have used GaAs- or AlGaAs/GaAs-based devices. Recently high electron mobility (HEMT) and heterojunction bipolar transistor (HBT) systems based on AlGaAs/InGaAs/GaAs, AllnAs/InGaAs, and InGaAs/InP have demonstrated excellent device performance at frequencies far exceeding those possible with the AlGaAs/GaAs system. In this Research Planning Grant award, both two- and three-terminal GaInP/GaAs and AlGaInP/GaAs devices will be fabricated and tested. The material will be grown by organo- metallic vapor phase epitaxy at the University of Utah and complete device characterization (dc to 60 GHz) will be carried out under this research. Device concepts to be implemented in this work will include discrete HEMT, insulated gate field effect transistors, and quantum well devices along with prototype varactor frequency multipliers and converters. After the completion of the planning research, optical control of microwave and millimeter wave devices of GaInP/GaAs and AlGaInP/GaAs heterosystems will also be investigated. The device concepts for high- frequency electronic and optoelectronic circuit applications will then be used for designing and fabricating a monolithic millimeter wave integrated circuit. In addition, two-dimensional array of high frequency devices of GaInP/GaAs and AlGaInP/GaAs will be fabricated to produce high output power (i.e., Watt level) at frequencies in the range of 94 to 147 GHz.
