Simulating the Mechanical and Electrical Properties of A Designed Magnetoelectric Resonant Gate Transistor
Open Access
- Author:
- Wu, Yufei
- Area of Honors:
- Electrical Engineering
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Science
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- Suman Datta, Thesis Supervisor
Dr. Julio V. Urbina, Thesis Honors Advisor - Keywords:
- Magnetoelectric Resonant Gate Transistor (MERGT)
COMSOL Multiphysics
Sentaurus - Abstract:
- The resonant gate transistor concept was first brought up by Nathanson et al. in 1967 for sensing displacement. This great work has opened the door for mechanical movement sensing with field effect transistor as read-out component. Inspired by the amplification of transistor and the transduction among electrical, magnetic, and mechanical energy domain realized by cantilever resonance, a magnetoelectric resonant gate transistor (MERGT) has been designed and fabricated, demonstrating a nanoTesla magnetic field detection sensitivity at room temperature. This thesis presents numerical simulations of the mechanical properties of the resonant gate and the electrical properties of the n-channel field effect transistor with two commercially available software packages, COMSOL Multiphysics and TCAD Sentaurus respectively. The frequency response of the resonating cantilever is studied and the effects of residual stress due to thermal processes during fabrication and air damping in cantilever oscillation are analyzed. For the electrical part, the Id-Vg characteristics of the nFET are simulated. Also, the amplification of small ac signal is demonstrated. After considering the laws governing cantilever vibrations, flux concentration effect in a magnetic field, and cantilever stiffness variations, an analysis is conducted to propose an improved resonant gate dimensions aiming at achieving higher gate sensitivity. Lastly, the numerical simulation results are compared with the experimental measurements and possible improvements of the designed MERGT in the future are discussed.