Low excess noise characteristics in thin avalancheregion GaAs diodes

Abstract

Avalanche noise measurements have been performed on a range of homojunction GaAs p+-i-n+ and n+-i-p+ diodes with avalanche widths w ranging from 1.13 to 0.050 µm. These noise measurements show that, contrary to McIntyre's avalanche noise theory, there is large reduction in the avalanche noise as w is decreased for both electron and hole initiated impact ionisation.