The performance of Schottky diodes as far-infrared modulators

We analyze the performance as a terahertz-frequency modulator of a small-area Schottky diode mounted in a corner-cube antenna. The analysis includes the effects of carrier inertia and dielectric relaxation as modeled by Champlin and Eisenstein (1978). It also includes the effect of the vanishing of the depletion region above the flat-band potential, as modeled by Crowe and Mattauch (1986). Our baseline calculation refers to a 1.4 μm diameter diode (Univ. of Virginia batch no. 1E12) operated at a carrier frequency of 2.52 THz and a modulation frequency of 8 GHz, as was used in the experiments of Watson, Grossman, and Phillips (1988). The effects on reflectivity modulation, and therefore on sideband-generation efficiency, of varying the diode parameters are investigated. Our conclusions are: A) For all realistic diode parameters, the phase modulation completely dominates the amplitude modulation. B) Performance is degraded well below the plasma frequency in the undepleted epilayer due to the presence of a second resonance, caused by the interaction of the barrier capacitance and the effective inductance due to carrier inertia, C) The effects of varying the antenna impedance, temperature, diode substrate size, and Schottky barrier height over realistic ranges are small. D) An improvement in single-sideband conversion efficiency of approximately 20 db may be obtained by increasing the epilayer doping and simultaneously reducing the diode radius.