OSA Proc. on Picosecond Electronics and Optoelectronics, Vol. 9, 1991, 282 p.This volume is a collection of papers that were presented at the fourth Picosecond Electronics and
Optoelectronics Topical Meeting of the Optical Society of America. The purpose of this topical
meeting, since its inception in 1985, has been to foster greater interaction between those segments
of the electronics and optics communities that have been pushing the frontiers toward ever higher
speeds. The following pages reveal some of the successful results of these efforts. This preface is
meant to serve as an introduction and summary of the meeting and as a guide to these proceedings.
Chapter I summarizes the state of the art in the relatively new field studying the generation and
propagation of electromagnetic pulses with terahertz bandwidths. These pulses have significant
implications for far-infrared spectroscopy and fundamental materials studies.
Chapter II contains recent advances in techniques used for ultrafast optoelectronics. This includes
the measurement of picosecond pulse propagation in one and two dimensions.
Chapter III describes the sensing of rapidly varying electric fields by picosecond optical pulses.
These techniques exploit the dependence of the index of refraction, and hence the optical path
length, on electric field. For GaAs, the electric fields in the substrate can be probed directly,
but some techniques move nonlinear material in to sample the fields.
Chapter IV covers improvements in the ultrafast detectors needed for high-speed optical
communication. The emphasis is on speed as well as quantum efficiency.
Chapter V contains several papers on high-speed electronic devices. The fastest transistors are
presented, both those based on silicon as well as In-V devices, and some unique applications of
fast, two-terminal devices are also discussed.
Chapter VI concentrates on the measurement of performance of millimeter-wave circuits using
optical sampling techniques. These techniques achieve in the time domain what is traditionally
accomplished at lower frequencies in the frequency domain.
Chapter VII reports advances in the technology of ultrafast lasers. Short, well-controlled pulses
are needed for optical communications, and one paper describes a mode-locked laser with up to a
350-GHz repetition rate.
In Chapter VII papers on tunneling and resonant tunneling are presented. Charge storage in the
well of a resonant-tunneling diode has been measured, and tunneling between two wells coupled
by a tunneling barrier is examined in several papers.
Chapter IX collects all the papers with a strong emphasis on materials development. Devices
that use strained layers, gallium arsenide grown by molecular beam epitaxy at low temperatures,
and nonlinear materials are examined.
Chapter X contains digest summaries from those authors who did not wish to write an
extended paper for this proceedings volume.
