Regenerative switching characteristics of a novel electrical or optical base-controlled AlGaAs/GaAs quantum-well heterojunction bipolar transistor

A report is presented on the regenerative switching characteristics of a novel AlGaAs/GaAs quantum-well heterojunction bipolar transistor (QWHBT) with an electrically or optically controlled base grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). This double-barrier QWHBT exhibits excellent electrical switching characteristics of 7 V and 0.03 A/cm/sup 2/ at the switching condition and 4.5 V and 3.2 A/cm/sup 2/ at the holding condition. When the device is operating as an optical switch, the optical base-controlled sensitivity is 6*10/sup -3/ V/ mu W. The effects of temperature on the device performance were evaluated at 77 and 300 K. The results show that it may be used as an all-optical switch (flip-flop) for optical parallel image processing.>