Investigation of palladium gated polarity controllable FET as a highly sensitive and robust hydrogen gas sensor

Abstract

The paper investigates the design and performance of a novel palladium gated‐polarity controllable Field Effect Transistor (FET) (PC‐FET) for hydrogen gas sensing applications. In the present work, catalytic sensing metal gate (palladium) is chosen as control gate (CG) and hydrogen gas molecules are exposed on the region controlled by CG. A compact analytical model has been derived for PC‐FET based sensor and the performance of the proposed gas sensor has been examined in terms of energy band profile, surface potential, electric field, transfer characteristics and transconductance and the derived analytical results are verified using TCAD simulated results. Furthermore, the sensitivity metrics such as threshold voltage sensitivity, drain current sensitivity, transconductance sensitivity and ION/OFF sensitivity have also been extensively investigated for both modes of proposed sensor for a wide range of pressure that is, 10−14–10−8 Torr.