1.6-kV 1.5-kA GaAs Avalanche Semiconductor Switch Triggered by 4 μJ Laser Diode

Abstract

A current of 1.54 kA was obtained under a bias voltage of only 1.6 kV by employing a single photoconductive semiconductor switch (PCSS) excited by a laser diode (LD) with energy of 4 μJ. In this work, an opposed contact structure PCSS was used instead of a lateral structure one. We show that a avalanche multiplication rate of PCSS as high as 258 has been obtained. The effects of the electric field strength and of the capacitance on the current waveform were investigated. Moreover, the damping degree was calculated in combination with the current waveform. The calculation indicates that the current attenuation degree increases upon the increase of the capacitance for a fixed value of the electric field strength, whereas the current attenuation degree decreases upon the increase of electric field strength for a fixed charging capacitance. The results obtained in this work show that, by employing opposed contact structure PCSSs in combination with a relatively low bias voltage and laser pulse energy, high-current and long pulse power devices based on inexpensive and compact sources can be produced.

Keywords

• Photoconductive semiconductor switches (PCSS)
• laser diode (LD)
• nonlinear mode