Negative transconductance via gating of the quantum well subbands in a resonant tunneling transistor.

Operation of a new resonant-tunneling transistor is reported in the AlGaAs/GaAs material system. The device contains an undoped quantum-well collector separated from a heavily-doped emitter by a thin tunnel barrier. The collector is gated and the gate field controls resonant-tunneling characteristics "from behind" via a combination of the generalized Stark effect and the quantum-capacitance effect. The common-collector characteristics show negative differential resistance at a fixed gate bias and negative transconductance at a fixed emitter bias. Excellent agreement is found between the measured and calculated shifts of the peaks of the current-voltage characteristics.