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A tunnel diode or Esaki diode is a type of semiconductor that is capable of very fast operation, well into the microwave frequency region, made possible by the use of the quantum mechanical effect called tunneling.

It was invented in August 1957 by Leo Esaki when he was with Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo, now known as Sony. In 1973 he received the Nobel Prize in Physics, jointly with Brian Josephson, for discovering the electron tunneling effect used in these diodes. Robert Noyce independently came up with the idea of a tunnel diode while working for William Shockley, but was discouraged from pursuing it.

These diodes have a heavily doped p–n junction that is about 10 nm (100 Å) wide. The heavy doping results in a broken band gap, where conduction band electron states on the n-side are more or less aligned with valence band hole states on the p-side.

Tunnel diodes were first manufactured by Sony in 1957 followed by General Electric and other companies from about 1960, and are still made in low volume today. Tunnel diodes are usually made from germanium, but can also be made from gallium arsenide and silicon materials. They are used in frequency converters and detectors. They have negative differential resistance in part of their operating range, and therefore are also used as oscillators, amplifiers, and in switching circuits using hysteresis.


Figure 6: 8–12 GHz tunnel diode amplifier, circa 1970
In 1977, the Intelsat V satellite receiver used a microstrip tunnel diode amplifier (TDA) front-end in the 14 to 15.5 GHz frequency band. Such amplifiers were considered state-of-the-art, with better performance at high frequencies than any transistor-based front end.