Investigation of field emission properties of 2-D electron accumulation and inversion layers in cleaved silicon MOS capacitors and transistors

Abstract

We investigated cleaved MOS capacitors and field effect transistors (FETs) for potential gate-controlled field emission. For the MOS capacitors we found that electrons can emerge from the accumulated region travelling to the gate, but only a small amount of that current is collected by an anode, probably due to insufficient field enhancement at the emission site. Initial experiments with cleaved FETs showed gate voltage dependency of the anode current. Prior to vacuum testing of these devices, we made sure that their C-V and drain current versus drain voltage dependencies were similar to their non-cleaved states, indicating that no damage at the cleaved regions occurred.