March 2014
Intermediate to advanced
624 pages
26h 33m
English
The tunnel diode is a p-n junction device that operates in certain regions of its I–V characteristic by the quantum mechanical tunneling of electrons through the potential barrier of the junction (see Sections 2.4.4 and 5.4.1). The tunneling process for reverse current is essentially the Zener effect, although negligible reverse bias is needed to initiate the process in tunnel diodes. As we shall see in this section, the tunnel diode (often called the Esaki diode after L. Esaki, who received the Nobel Prize in 1973 for his work on the effect) exhibits the important feature of negative resistance over a portion of its I–V characteristic.
Thus far, we have discussed the properties of relatively ...