EN5256-Microwave Engineering

Negative Resistance Devices

Name : J.M.H.G. Jayasundara Index No : 090217D Date of Submission : 8/22/2013

Negative resistance
Negative resistance is a property of some electric circuits where an increase in the current entering a port results in a decreased voltage across the same port. This is in contrast to a simple ohmic resistor, which exhibits an increase in voltage under the same conditions. Negative resistors are theoretical and do not exist as a discrete component. However, some types of diodes can be built that exhibit negative resistance in some part of their operating range. Such a differential negative resistance is illustrated in Figure 1 with a Gunn diode. Electric discharges through gases exhibit negative resistance, and some chalcogenide glasses, organic semiconductors, and conductive polymers exhibit a similar region of negative resistance as a bulk property. In electronics, negative resistance devices are used to make bistable switching circuits, and electronic oscillators, particularly at microwave frequencies.

Negative Resistance Devices Gunn Diode

A Gunn Diode is essentially just a piece of doped semiconductor with two electrical contacts on opposite ends. Its called a diode because it has just two wires and has a non-linear I/V behavior like normal diodes. However, unlike real diodes its I/V behavior is symmetric .
Figure 1: I/V curve for Gunn diode

For most materials the current is simply proportional to the applied voltage. Such materials are said to obey Ohm's Law. Looking at the I/V plot illustrated in figure 1 we can see that this material is not Ohmic. In general, the current tends to rise with increasing voltage, but there is a region between the peak voltage, and valley voltage, where the current falls as the voltage is increased. This is called the Negative Resistance Region because in this voltage range the dynamic resistance, r<0. Note, however, that the static resistance is always positive. For this reason, although it is conventional to call this effect negative resistance it should more strictly be called Negative Differential Resistance or Negative Differential Conductance. The peak voltage is often called the Threshold voltage since it represents a threshold we have get over to reach the negative resistance region.

Tunnel Diode
A tunnel diode or Esaki diode is a type of semiconductor diode that is capable of very fast operation, well into the microwave frequency region, by using the quantum mechanical effect called tunneling. These diodes have a heavily doped pn junction only some 10 nm (100 ) wide. The heavy doping results in a broken bandgap, where conduction band electron states on the n-side are more or less aligned with valence band hole states on the p-side. They have negative differential resistance in part of their

operating range, and therefore are also used as oscillators, amplifiers, and in switching circuits using hysteresis. Under normal forward bias operation, as voltage begins to increase, electrons at first tunnel through the very narrow pn junction barrier because filled electron states in the conduction band on the n-side become aligned with empty valence band hole states on the p-side of the p-n junction. As voltage increases further these states become more misaligned and the current drops this is called negative resistance because current decreases with increasing voltage. As voltage increases yet further, the diode begins to operate as a normal diode, where electrons travel by
Figure 2: I/V curve for Tunnel diode

conduction across the pn junction, and no longer by tunneling through the pn junction barrier. The most important operating region for a tunnel diode is the negative resistance region.

Applications Oscillators
Using A.C. circuit analysis we can obtain the current around the loop must be of the general form ( ) When ( ) [( ) ]

, ( ) can expressed as where and |

|
Figure 3: Simple Resonance Circuit

Figure 4 illustrates how the current in the circuit varies with time when we start with an initial non-zero current. In each case the current can be see to oscillate sinusoidally with the angular frequency,w, and the amplitude of the oscillation varies exponentially with time in a way which depends upon the resistance
Figure 4: Effect Of resistance value/sign on current oscillation

A negative resistance value means that is positive. This means the oscillation amplitude and energy grow exponentially with time. In practice, we can't ever obtain an oscillation whose energy grows larger without limit. Infinite powers and energies aren't accessible in the real world.

Amplifiers
Negative resistance device can be used to amplify a signal and this is an especially useful technique at microwave frequencies. Such devices do not present as pure negative resistance at these frequencies (in the case of the tunnel diode a large parallel capacitance is also present) and a matching filter is usually required. The reactive components of the device's equivalent circuit can be absorbed into the filter design so the circuit can be represented as a pure resistance followed by a band pass filter. Let the reflection coefficients of the two ends of the filter to be When , And Two reflection coefficients must be equal because the filter has no resistive elements. Then the output power is given by, ,

|
When ( Then )

is replaced by a negative resistance

Figure 5: Negative resistance microwave amplifier using a circulator

Now the reflection coefficients are very large and more power is reaching the load than was injected in the input port. The net result of terminating one port in a negative resistance is amplification between the remaining two ports.