Concept of new photodetector based on single electron transistor for single charge detection

¹ Laboratoire de Microélectronique et Instrumentation, UR/03/13-04, Faculté des Sciences de Monastir, Avenue de l'Environnement, 5019 Monastir, Tunisia
² Équipe composants électroniques, UR/99/13-22, Institut Préparatoire aux Études d'Ingénieurs de Nabeul (IPEIN), 8000 Merazka, Nabeul, Tunisia
³ Institut des Nanotechnologies de Lyon, Site INSA UMR 5270, Bât. Blaise Pascal, 7 av. Jean Capelle, 69621 Villeurbanne Cedex, France

Corresponding author: manel.troudi@ipein.rnu.tn

Received: 11 December 2008
Accepted: 19 January 2009
Published online: 27 March 2009

Abstract

In this paper, we present a model proposition of photo-SET (single electron photo-detector) aiming at detecting one by one electrons. In the first part of this work, we present the two blocs of the proposed photo-SET (reading and detection blocs). The device structure presented is consisting of two SETs capacitively coupled. In this model, the first SET (SET₁) is supposed to read the charge whereas the detection bloc is represented by the second SET (SET₂). In the second part, we investigate the effects of photoexcitation on I_d-V_g curves and we present results obtained on the output photo-SET characteristics after variation of power illumination and response time.