Monolithic integrated receiver front end consisting of a photoconductive detector and a GaAs selectively doped heterostructure transistor

We report the first demonstration of a monolithically integrated receiver front end consisting of a GaAs selectively doped heterostructure transistor (SDHT) and a photoconductive detector. Due to its simplicity in the required epitaxial layers and device fabrication, the photoconductive detector/SDHT integration scheme is one of the simplest ever reported. The detector has a measured gain-bandwidth product of 5 GHz and the SDHT has a transconductance of 100–140 mS/mm. For an error rate of 10−9 at 90 MHz, the receiver has sensitivities at 0.82 μm of −36.2 dBm and −42.2 dBm for pseudorandom patterns and fixed bit patterns of 101010..., respectively, for an uncoated device.