US Patent 7835705 Integrated bidirectional junction engineered dual insulator transceiver

A bi-directional transceiver (100) having reduced circuitry and that may be formed on a non-semiconductor substrate includes impedance matching and filtering circuitry (114, 116, 122, 124, 128, 132) coupled to a non-linear diode (118) for converting a lower frequency modulated signal to a higher frequency RF transmit signal and to function as a square-law detector to envelope detect RF signals. The non-linear diode (118) includes, in one exemplary embodiment, at least two insulative layers disposed between two conductive layers, wherein a quantum well is formed between the insulators that allows only high-energy tunneling.