Recent Advances of Grating-Gate Transistors for Fast, Sensitive, Room-Temperature Plasmonic Terahertz Detection

We review recent advances of InGaAs-channel grating-gate high-electron-mobility transistors as fast, highly sensitive, room-temperature-operating THz detectors for THz wireless communication systems and THz imaging/sensing systems. We experimentally demonstrated that the gate-readout of the photovoltage from a detector, instead of the conventional drain-readout, simultaneously enables the scaling of the photovoltage with the active area size, the impedance matching with 50-Ω interconnection systems, and enhancement of the responsivity owning to the “3D rectification effect”.