Gunn, the inventor of the
Gunn diode used in police radars -- and been completely buried in the literature and forgotten.
Bhat, "Millimeter-wave Evanescent Mode
Gunn Diode Oscillator in Suspended Stripline Configuration," IR & MM Wave, 22nd International Conference, July 1997, pp.
These were the design considerations when a surface-mount, substrate-based
Gunn diode voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) was developed for use in a 77 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar sensor.
This was not an issue in the constant envelope modulation formats, such as 4FSK, which was almost universally used in the previous generation of millimeter radios with saturated output stages, including directly modulated
Gunn diode oscillators.
Gunn diode, cavity-based oscillators provide significant advantages over FET-based oscillators for digital radio applications at frequencies from 15 to 50 GHz.
Older radio link architectures have been based on
Gunn diode technologies where the Gunn device directly generates the carrier frequencies for the transmitter and is used as the local oscillator (LO) for the receiver.
A
Gunn diode oscillator is then presented that delivers a pulsed peak power of over 3 W at 5.5 GHz.
The
Gunn diode and varactor are arranged in a series-tuned configuration using the radial disc geometry|3~ with extraction of the second harmonic.
It incorporates a
Gunn diode, a Schottky diode, matching network and bias on a single 5 x 3 mm integrated chip.
Monolithic integration of a
Gunn diode has been demonstrated on a uniplanar resonator|24~ and its results are directly applicable to the active notch design.
To date, power generation at mm-wave frequencies has been mostly relegated to two-terminal devices, such as the
Gunn diode, since these devices deliver high output power with relatively simple circuitry.