Plasma-resonant THz detection with HEMTs

Abstract

In this work, by means of Monte Carlo simulations we analyze the dependence of the DC drain current value in a 80nm-gate InAlAs/InGaAs HEMTs on the frequency of a sinusoidal signal superimposed to the DC gate bias. Interestingly, a resonant peak appears in the drain current response, which lies in the THz frequency range, in good agreement with recent experiments made on similar devices. Moreover, the frequency of the resonant peak is dependent on the length of the source-gate region, but independent of the length of the drain-gate region, thus indicating that the source-gate region acts as the plasma wave cavity leading to the resonant detection of THz radiation in HEMTs.