A Novel TMOSFET Ternary Inverter Based on Hybrid Conduction Mechanism

With the continuous development of CMOS technology, the feature size of MOSFETs is continuously shrunk, the short channel effects become more and more serious, which makes the static power consumption increase and now the static power consumption becomes the main source of the power consumption of the integrated circuits. At present, the performance of CMOS binary logic processors is nearly reaching the bottleneck; therefore the study of ternary logic becomes a research hotspot to promote the development of high performance and low power integrated circuits. Compared with binary logic, ternary logic possesses stronger data expression ability, which can not only improve the data density, but also reduce the circuit power consumption and the system complexity. However, using binary devices to build ternary logic circuits requires a large number of components, and even requires the passive components, which cannot exploit the advantages of ternary logic. The other method of implementing ternary logic is through the utilization of innovative two-dimensional materials. This method requires a small number of components and obviates the need for passive components, but it faces the problem that the fabrication process is not mature and can’t be mass-produced. To solve these issues, this paper combines the tunneling and the drift diffusion mechanism, proposed tunneling metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (TMOSFET) which three-state characteristics make it highly suitable for ternary logic design. Compared with other ternary logic schemes, the ternary inverter based on TMOSFET has the same circuit structure with binary inverter, which can simplify the circuit design. In this paper, the operational mechanism of this ternary inverter is studied, and the condition of three-state output of inverter is analyzed. It is found that when the operating voltage VDD and the device turning voltage Vturn satisfy VDD/Vturn≈1.4, the input voltage ranges of the three output states are equivalent. In addition, the impact of TMOSFET transfer characteristic on this ternary inverter is also analyzed. This has certain reference significance for the future design and research of ternary logic circuits.