Electronic circuit with controllable negative differential resistance and its applications

Abstract

Electronic devices and circuits with negative differential resistance (NDR) are widely used in oscillators, memory devices, frequency multipliers, mixers, etc. Such devices and circuits usually have an N-, S-, or Λ-type current-voltage characteristics. In the known NDR devices and circuits, it is practically impossible to increase the negative resistance without changing the type or the dimensions of transistors. Moreover, some of them have three terminals assuming two power supplies. In this paper, a new NDR circuit that comprises a combination of a field effect transistor (FET) and a simple bipolar junction transistor (BJT) current mirror (CM) with multiple outputs is proposed. A distinctive feature of the proposed circuit is the ability to change the magnitude of the NDR by increasing the number of outputs in the CM. Mathematical expressions are derived to calculate the threshold currents and voltages of the N-type current-voltage characteristics for various types of FET. The calculated current and voltage thresholds are compared with the simulation results. The possible applications of the proposed NDR circuit for designing single-frequency oscillators and voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO) are considered. The designed NDR VCO has a very low level of phase noise and has one of the best values of a standard figure of merit (FOM) among recently published VCOs. The effectiveness of the proposed oscillators is confirmed by the simulation results and the implemented prototype.