Field effect transistors

The field-effect transistor (FET) is a transistor that uses an electric field to control the electrical behaviour of the device. FETs are also known as unipolar transistors since they involve single-carrier-type operation. Many different implementations of field effect transistors exist. Field effect transistors generally display very high input impedance at low frequencies. The conductivity between the drain and source terminals is controlled by an electric field in the device, which is generated by the voltage difference between the body and the gate of the device.

The field-effect transistor was first patented by Julius Edgar Lilienfeld in 1926 and by Oskar Heil in 1934, but practical semiconducting devices (the JFET) were developed only much later after the transistor effect was observed and explained by the team of William Shockley at Bell Labs in 1947, immediately after the 20-year patent period eventually expired. The MOSFET, which largely superseded the JFET and had a profound effect on digital electronic development, was invented by Dawon Kahng and Martin Atalla in 1959.

FETs can be majority-charge-carrier devices, in which the current is carried predominantly by majority carriers, or minority-charge-carrier devices, in which the current is mainly due to a flow of minority carriers. The device consists of an active channel through which charge carriers, electrons or holes, flow from the source to the drain. Source and drain terminal conductors are connected to the semiconductor through ohmic contacts. The conductivity of the channel is a function of the potential applied across the gate and source terminals.

The FET's three terminals are:

All FETs have source, drain, and gate terminals that correspond roughly to the emitter, collector, and base of BJTs. Most FETs have a fourth terminal called the body, base, bulk, or substrate. This fourth terminal serves to bias the transistor into operation; it is rare to make non-trivial use of the body terminal in circuit designs, but its presence is important when setting up the physical layout of an integrated circuit. The size of the gate, length L in the diagram, is the distance between source and drain. The width is the extension of the transistor, in the direction perpendicular to the cross section in the diagram (i.e., into/out of the screen). Typically the width is much larger than the length of the gate. A gate length of 1 µm limits the upper frequency to about 5 GHz, 0.2 µm to about 30 GHz.

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