Essentials of MOSFETs

Unit 1: Transistors and Circuits

Lecture 1.1:
The MOSFET as a Black Box
Mark Lundstrom

[email protected]
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Purdue University
West Lafayette, Indiana USA

Lundstrom: 2018 1
 Side and top views of a MOSFET

Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor

n-Si S D n-Si

p-type silicon

SiO2 gate
source drain

side view Lundstrom: 2018 top view 2

 Transistors

Discrete Integrated circuits

Intel 4004 (2300 transistors) 1971

https://www.extremetech.com/computing/1050
29-intel-4004-the-first-cpu-is-40-years-old- 3
today
 The transistor as a “black box”

terminal 1 There are many kinds of transistors:

I1 MOSFET
SOI MOSFET
FinFETs
black SB FET
box FinFET
control terminal 4 MODFET (HEMT)
bipolar transistor
JFET
heterojunction bipolar transistor
BTBT FET
terminal 2 SpinFET
…
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 The bulk MOSFET

S G D
circuit symbol

Gate

source drain
SiO2

Source Drain
silicon
Body

B
(Texas Instruments, ~ 2000) 5
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 Modern MOSFETs: The FinFET

silicon fin

Source: Intel

Digh Hisamoto, Wen-Chin Lee, Jakub Kedzierski, Hideki Takeuchi, Kazuya

Asano, Charles Kuo, Erik Anderson, Tsu-Jae King, Jeffrey Bokor, Chenming Hu,
“FinFET-a self-aligned double-gate MOSFET scalable to 20 nm,” IEEE
Transactions on Electron Devices, 47, 2320-2325, 2000.
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 The MOSFET as a 2-port device
MOSFET circuit symbol common source

Drain
D

Gate G
output

input
Source S

current vs. voltage (IV)

characteristics transfer

output
7
 IV characteristics: resistor

less
resistance

more
resistance

Ohm’s Law

Georg Ohm, 1827 Lundstrom: 2018 8

IV characteristics: ideal current source

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 IV characteristics: transistors

n-channel
enhancement gate voltage gate voltage controlled
mode MOSFET controlled resistor current source
“linear region” “saturation region” 10
IV characteristics: real current sources

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 IV characteristics: transistors

D
output resistance

n-channel
enhancement
mode MOSFET Lundstrom: 2018 12
 MOSFET IV: output characteristics

“subthreshold region”
n-channel
enhancement “linear region” “saturation region”
mode MOSFET 13
Lundstrom: 2018 VDSAT
 Output vs. transfer characteristics

output characteristics transfer characteristics

high VDS D
low VDS

“saturation voltage” Lundstrom: 2018 “threshold voltage” 14

 Applications of MOSFETs

switch amplifier
symbo
l
D
D
D

G G output
G S input signal
signal S

S
digital analog

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 N-channel vs. P-channel MOSFETs

N-MOSFET P-MOSFET

n-Si S “channel” D n-Si p-Si S “channel”

D p-Si

p-type silicon n-type silicon

side view side view

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 Summary

1) Transistors are three (or sometime four) terminal

devices that control a large output current with an
input voltage (or sometimes with a small input current).

2) Transistors can operate as a voltage controlled resistor

or as a voltage controlled current course.

3) The shape of the IV characteristics make transistors

useful in digital and analog circuits.

4) The shape of the IV characteristics is determined by

the physics of the transistor.
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 Next topic: A primer on digital circuits

Device engineers assess MOSFETs in terms of a few key

device metrics.

To understand these device metrics, we must first

understand a little about digital and analog circuits.

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