Heterostructure barrier varactor

The device was invented by Erik Kollberg together with Anders Rydberg in 1989[1] at Chalmers University of Technology.

The gap in the middle of the diode symbol represents the inherent capacitance of the device.

As a consequence the HBV has electrical properties resembling the parallel plate capacitor with a voltage dependent plate distance d. The main application for the HBV diode is to generate extremely high frequency signals from lower frequency input.

[5] The frequency multiplication is made possible by the highly nonlinear voltage dependence of the capacitance C(V).

By feeding the HBV a signal of low frequency f1, higher harmonics f3=3f1 (tripler), f5=5f1 (quintupler), ... will be generated.