Traveling-Wave Membrane Photomixers

Traveling-wave photomixers have superior performance when compared with lumped area photomixers in the 1 to 3 THz frequency range. Their large active area and distributed gain mechanism assure high thermal damage threshold and elimination of the capacitive frequency roll-off. However, the losses experienced by the radio frequency wave traveling along the coplanar strips waveguide (due to underlying semi-infinite GaAs substrate) were a serious drawback. In this paper we present device designs and an experimental setup that make possible the realization of photomixers on membranes which eliminate the losses.