REACHING THE FUNDAMENTAL LIMITS

There is a growing interest in terahertz and mm-wave systems for compact, low cost and energy efficient imaging and spectroscopy. Detection of concealed weapons, cancer diagnosis, food quality control, and breath analyses for disease diagnosis are among many examples that will rapidly flourish if compact and on-chip terahertz systems are realized. There are few implementations of terahertz building blocks using compound semiconductors at lower terahertz range. Unfortunately, these processes have low yield, are cost inefficient, and are not suitable for integration of digital blocks on the same chip. On the other hand, while CMOS can overcome these challenges, the best reported fmax of CMOS transistors fall well below terahertz frequencies. To overcome these drawbacks, we have introduced systematic methodologies for de-signing circuits and components operating close to and beyond the conventional limits of the devices. These circuit blocks can effectively generate, combine, and process sig-nals from multiple devices to achieve performances orders of magnitude better than the state of the art. The proposed techniques are general and can be used in any technology, including CMOS and other processes