Active devices include diodes, transistors, and electron tubes, which can be used for signal detection,

mixing, amplification, frequency multiplication, and switching, and as sources of RF and microwave
signals. We will discuss some of the basic characteristics of such devices in this chapter. We will avoid
detailed discussion of the physics of active devices (see references [1–5] for such material) since for our
purposes it will be adequate to work with the terminal characteristics of diodes and transistors using
equivalent circuits or scattering parameters. These results will be used to study some basic diode
detector and control circuits, and in later chapters for the design of amplifier, mixer, and oscillator
circuits using diodes and transistors. We will conclude this chapter with an overview of microwave
integrated circuits (MICs) and a brief discussion of some microwave tubes. Historically, the development
of useful RF and microwave active devices has been a long and slow process. The first detector diode
was probably the “cat-whisker” crystal detector used in early radio work of the nineteenth century. The
advent of electron tubes used as detectors and amplifiers later eliminated this component in most radio
systems, but crystal diodes were used by Southworth in his 1930s experiments with waveguides since
tube detectors could not operate at such high frequencies. Frequency conversion and heterodyning
were also first developed for radio applications in the 1920s. These same techniques were later applied
to microwave radars at the MIT Radiation Laboratory during World War II (using crystal diodes as
mixers) [1], but it was not until the 1960s that the subject of microwave