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Picosecond bistable operation has been experimentally observed for the first time in a double-barrier resonant tunneling diode. A rise time of 2 ps was measured using the electro-optic sampling technique; this is the fastest switching event yet observed for an electronic device. This time domain measurement adds necessary information to the understanding of the transport mechanisms in the resonant tunneling diode and is consistent with switching time limitations computed for the device. It also demonstrates that appropriately designed double-barrier quantum well diodes have a response time comparable to that of the fastest all-optical logic elements, and that they may be very useful in high-speed logic applications.
Whitaker et al. (Mon,) studied this question.