Abstract
Source-gated transistors (SGTs) have potentially very high output impedance and low saturation voltages, which make them ideal as building blocks for high-performance analog circuits fabricated in thin-film technologies. The quality of saturation is greatly influenced by the design of the field-relief structure incorporated into the source electrode. Starting from measurements on self-aligned polysilicon structures, we show through numerical simulations how the field plate (FP) design can be improved. A simple source FP around 1 μm long situated several tens of nanometers above the semiconductor can increase the low-voltage intrinsic gain by more than two orders of magnitude and offers adequate tolerance to process variations in a moderately scaled thin-film SGT. © 2012 IEEE.