Significant performance enhancement in continuous wave terahertz photomixers based on fractal structures

Abstract

A photoconductive fractal antenna significantly improves the performance of photomixing-based continuous wave (CW) terahertz (THz) systems. An analysis has been carried out for the generation of CW-THz radiation by photomixer photoconductive antenna technique. To increase the active area for generation and hence the THz radiation power we used interdigitated electrodes that are coupled with a fractal tree antenna. In this paper, both semiconductor and electromagnetic problems are considered. Here, photomixer devices with Thue-Morse fractal tree antennas in two configurations (narrow and wide) are discussed. This new approach gives better performance, especially in the increasing of THz output power of photomixer devices, when compared with the conventional structures. In addition, applying the interdigitated electrodes improved THz photocurrent, considerably. It produces THz radiation power several times higher than the photomixers with simple gap.