Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) Pulsed Current-Voltage Characterization Technique: Design and Discussion

Abstract

In this paper, we implement the pulsed current–voltage (PIV) technique for the metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) device’s ultrafast characterization based on the OpAmp amplifier OPA818. The latter dropped down the measurement time for a whole MOSFET characteristic to \({{t}_{M}}\) = 50 ns as an enhancement. Furthermore, a study concerning the technique’s dependency on measurement time (\({{t}_{M}}\)), channel length (\(L\)), and channel width (\(W\)) is accomplished. It is found that the distortion in the technique’s results, labeled as hysteresis, is inversely proportional to measurement time and it increases dramatically with very low values of \({{t}_{M}}\). Also, the results show that PIV could have a somehow direct proportionality to channel length, and it is justified by the gate/drain capacitance (\({{C}_{{{\text{gd}}}}}\)) effect. On the other hand, the technique shows no dependency on channel width at all. Moreover, as measurements limitations, the results couldn’t record drain currents less than \({{I}_{{{\text{ds}}}}}\) ≈ 10^–7 A, this makes PIV limited to the study of threshold voltage degradation (\(\Delta {{V}_{{{\text{th}}}}}\)) only. However, this issue is well discussed and solutions have been proposed.