Note: Picosecond impulse generator driven by cascaded step recovery diode pulse shaping circuit.

In this paper, a picosecond impulse generator using step recovery diodes (SRDs) is presented. In order to reduce the pulse width of an impulse generator, we employed a cascaded SRD pulse-shaping circuit. A short impulse generation is confirmed in numerical simulation of a time-transient circuit simulator. Measurements show that the measured pulse width of the cascaded SRD impulse generator is 250 ps at 10% of the peak amplitude, which is improved by 85 ps compared with a conventional SRD impulse generator.