Comparative Efficiency and Power Assessment of Optical Photoconductive Material-Based Terahertz Sources for Wireless Communication Systems

Terahertz band has recently attracted the attention of the communication society due to its huge bandwidth and very high-speed wireless communications capability. It has been utilized in a variety of disciplines including physics, biology and astronomy for years; and the main concerns have always been obtaining highly efficient and high-power terahertz sources. Today, these problems are still the most important issues in establishing an operable wireless terahertz communication link. In this paper, recent studies in the field of terahertz source design are investigated based on the terahertz output power and efficiency. Solid-state sources and optical sources were comparatively reviewed with optical photoconductive material (OPM)-based methods which are combined with the terahertz antennas in the design phase generally. For wireless communication, the most suitable frequencies are between 0.3THz and 1THz due to the attenuation profile of the atmosphere. For this reason, based on the recently published stu...