Binhong Li

The core–shell junctionless MOSFET (CS-JL FET) meets the process requirements of FD-SOI technology. The transistor body comprises a heavily doped ultrathin layer (core linking the source and the drain), located underneath an undoped layer (shell). Drain current, transconductance, and capacitance characteristics demonstrate striking performance improvement compared with conventional junctionless MOSFETs. The addition of the shell results in one order of magnitude higher mobility (peak value), transconductance, and drive current. The doping and thickness of the core can be engineered to achieve a positive threshold voltage for normally-off operation. The CS-JL FET is compatible with back-biasing and downscaling schemes. The physical mechanisms are revealed by emphasizing the roles of the main device parameters.

N-type organic field-effect transistors have suffered from poor environmental instability. Here, we report that, by using nickel (Ni) instead of the commonly used gold (Au) as contact electrodes, n-type polymer transistors showed much improved stability upon annealing in nitrogen and exposure to air. In particular, Au-contacted devices exhibited pronounced ambipolar conduction whereas Ni-contacted devices retained fairly good unipolar properties. The results are important to build stable n-type polymer transistors at low cost.

The silicon-on-insulator (SOI) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) suffer intensive self-heating effects due to the reduced thermal conductivity of the silicon layer while the feature sizes of devices scale down to the nanometer regime. In this work, analytical models of thermal conductivity considering the self-heating effect (SHE) in ultra-thin body fully depleted (UTB-FD) SOI MOSFETs are presented to investigate the influences of impurity, free and bound electrons, and boundary reflection effects on heat diffusion mechanisms. The thermal conductivities of thin silicon films with different parameters, including temperature, depth, thickness and doping concentration, are discussed in detail. The results show that the thermal dissipation associated with the impurity, the free and bound electrons, and especially the boundary reflection effects varying with position due to phonon scattering, greatly suppressed the heat loss ability of the nanoscale ultra-thin silicon film. The predictive power of the thermal conductivity model is enhanced for devices with sub-10-nm thickness and a heavily doped silicon layer while considering the boundary scattering contribution. The absence of the impurity, the electron or the boundary scattering leads to the unreliability in the model prediction with a small coefficient of determination.

The reliability of mobility has come to be a critical issue to the development of new electronics especially for organic electronics, since mobility is typically extracted from field‐effect transistors containing various extrinsic effects and overestimation is popular in the literature. Recently, this issue is emphasized and a reliability factor (r) is proposed by pioneers to gauge the mobility reported. Albeit many factors discussed, how much the extrinsic effects influence r remains unrevealed and a facile solution by using organic transistors is still lacking. Here, it is shown that the widely used extraction method based on the saturation transfer characteristics is sensitive to contact effect and temperature with r dropping to 43%, indeed leading to large mobility overestimation. By contrast, the linear‐regime methods are more reliable particularly the Y‐function method that demonstrates great reliability (r ≈ 100%) even for short‐channel transistors at ultralow temperatures. In addition, operating in saturation regime induces ambipolar conduction further deteriorating reliability if contact doping is absent. High Schottky barriers, on the other side, distort device characteristics making extraction impossible. The results of this study reveal that, aside from device optimizations, selecting a right method is essential for reliable and precise evaluation of the carrier mobility by using organic transistors.

Submillimetre gaps caused by buttons, switches exist in the electronic device. IEC 61000‐4‐2 indicates that contact discharge method will be used if these floating metals could be touched in its normal use. Secondary discharge happens when conduct contact discharge on these floating metals. The influence of the secondary discharge on the repeatability of contact discharge method using experimental method is analysed. At same applied voltage, the secondary discharge current varies largely, causing bad repeatability. The time lag is the main parameter that influences the secondary discharge greatly. The time lag distribution is also analysed.

This paper presents an original study aiming at evaluating the drift of susceptibility level of a mixed signal circuit during its lifetime. The paper first addresses the issues linked to the experimental set-up and the recommendations required to extract susceptibility level variations. Then the paper presents the evolution of susceptibility after a standard accelerated aging of various digital and analog blocks. While digital blocks remain insensitive to aging, an analog block such as a voltage-controlled oscillator exhibits a significant reduction of its immunity level.