The complete semiconductor transistor

Summary form only given. Semiconductors have two types of charge carriers, electrons and holes. Therefore, the complete semiconductor transistors are always bipolar, that is, its electrical characteristics contain both electron and hole currents controlled by changing the spatial distributions of both electron and hole charges using externally applied electric field to the semiconductor. The two forms of today's widely used semiconductor transistors were invented and theoretically analyzed by William Bradford Shockley (1910-1989) in his two journal articles, the 1949 "p/n Junction Transistor," and the 1952 "Unipolar 'Field-Effect' Transistor". Shockley's 1952 "unipolar" transistor and its physical structure variations introduced subsequently by his followers in the next 60 years (1949-2009) are all incomplete forms of the complete semiconductor transistor, because they contained only electron or hole current, but not both, although in the transistor theories of Shockley and his followers, both electron and hole space charge variations are taken into account in the modulations of the unipolar current, either by electrons or by holes. In this presentation, we rectify this 60-year-old deficiency, by giving physical structures of the complete transistors and their current-voltage equations which contain both electron and hole currents in addition to their space charges. Computed theoretical characteristics are presented for the Bipolar Field-Effect Transistor (BiFET) such as the nanometer double-gate thin-base metal-oxide-silicon field-effect transistor known as the FinFET. As an application example, the voltage inverter circuit function using two MOS transistors, an n-channel and a p-channel surface inversion channel transistors, known as the Complementary MOS (CMOS) voltage inverter circuit, is physically realized and demonstrated in one physical MOS BiFET (or MOS FinFET) by leveraging the simultaneous presence of both electron and hole currents. This doubles the function density of the Moore's Law by a factor of two without reducing the lithography dimension of the transistor. The experimental data reported at the 2005 IEDM by the IMEC multi-company project (Intel, Samsung, Tl, Phillips) taken on the very many nanometer silicon MOS FinFETs led us to the discovery of the presence of bipolar currents. Our discovery immediately led us to our complete theoretical analyses and numerical computations of the analytical current-voltage and conductance-voltage characteristics, using the concept of electron and hole (unipolar) contacts and the many electron-hole (bipolar) contacts that are obvious and can be innovated by transistor designers and manufacturers.