Nanoscale Complementary Vacuum Field Emission Transistor
Jin‐Woo Han, Myeong‐Lok Seol, Jungsik Kim, M. Meyyappan
Abstract
Nanoscale vacuum channel transistors based on field emission have gained attention recently, and device demonstrations using various material systems have been reported. Whereas solid-state electronics leverages n- and p-type semiconductors for complementary logic circuits, vacuum electronics uses only electron transport as no p-type vacuum devices exist. Here, we propose a complementary vacuum field emission transistor (VFET) using electron-only field emission mechanism. By combining the rectifying characteristics of the field emission current due to an asymmetric source and drain (cathode and anode) structure and the source-to-drain gap modulation by nanoelectromechanical actuation due to the gate voltage, we configured the VFET to turn on only when a high positive (negative) voltage is applied to both the gate and drain for n-type (p-type) VFET. The complementary devices are connected in series to configure an inverter as a representative logic gate to demonstrate the possibilities.