Resonant tunnelling diode speeds ahead of 5G
Researchers at the US Naval Research Laboratory have developed an RTD (resonant tunnelling diode), a new gallium nitride-based electrical component with performance claimed to be beyond the anticipated speed of 5G.
The fifth-generation network technology is now just starting to roll out across the United States.
NRL’s David Storm, a research physicist, and Tyler Growden, an electrical engineer and NRC post-doc, have reported their electronic component diode research in Applied Physics Letters.
"Our work showed that gallium nitride-based RTDs are not inherently slow, as others suggested," Growden said in a statement. "They compare well in both frequency and output power to RTDs of different materials."
The diodes are said to enable extremely fast transportation of electrons to take advantage of quantum tunnelling. In this tunnelling, electrons create current by moving through physical barriers, taking advantage of their ability to behave as particles and waves.
According to NEL, Storm and Growden's design for gallium nitride-based diodes displayed record current outputs and switching speeds, enabling applications requiring electromagnetics in the millimetre-wave region and frequencies in terahertz. Such applications could include communications, networking, and sensing.
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