Measurement of substrate current in SOI MOSFETs

A new “Quasi-SOI” MOSFET structure is shown to allow direct measurement of substrate current in a fully-depleted SOI device. The holes generated by impact ionization near the drain are collected at the substrate terminal after they have traversed the source-body barrier and caused bipolar multiplication. By monitoring this hole current, direct characterization of the impact-ionization multiplication factor, M, and the parasitic bipolar gain, β, was performed. It was found that M-1 increases exponentially with V_DS and decreases with V_GS, exhibiting a drain field dependence. The bipolar gain β was found to be as high as 1000 for V_GS-V_T=0 V and V_DS=-2.5 V, but decreases exponentially as V_DS increases. Finally, it was found that β also decreases as V_GS increases