Abstract

The design of traveling-wave structures for high-speed analog and digital circuits requires accurate modeling to deal with arbitrary cross-sections, metallic regions with fi-nite conductivity, and semiconductor layers. The presence of such high-conductivity layers can strongly affect the microwave propagation characteristics of quasi-TEM transmission lines; in fact, free carrier screening of the electric field in regions penetrated by the magnetic field can lead to slow-wave behaviour. In the present paper, we present a numerical technique which combines a charge transport model with the quasi-static solution of Maxwell’s equations, thus allowing an accurate and self-consistent evaluation of the quasi-TEM line parameters. The proposed approach is applied to the analysis of a Si-Ge p-i-n raveling-wave photodetector.