Electrical properties of an AIlnN/GaN high-electron mobility transistor （HEMT） on a sapphire substrate are investigated in a cryogenic temperature range from 295 K down to 50 K. It is shown that drain saturation current and conductance increase as transistor operation temperature decreases. A self-heating effect is observed over the entire range of temperature under high power consumption. The dependence of channel electron mobility on electron density is investigated in detail. It is found that aside from Coulomb scattering, electrons that have been pushed away from the AIInN/GaN interface into the bulk GaN substrate at a large reverse gate voltage are also responsible for the electron mobility drop with the decrease of electron density.
Classic field ionization requires extremely high positive electric fields, of the order of a few million volts per centimeter. Here we show that field ionization can occur at dramatically lower fields on the electrode of silicon nanowires （SiNWs） with dense surface states and large field enhancement factor. A field ionization structure using SiNWs as the anode has been investigated, in which the SiNWs were fabricated by improved chemical etching process. At room temperature and atmospheric pressure, breakdown of the air is reproducible with a fixed anode-to-cathode distance of 0.5 μm. The breakdown voltage is -38 V, low enough to be achieved by a batterypowered unit. Two reasons can be given for the low breakdown voltage. First, the gas discharge departs from the Paschen＇s law and the breakdown voltage decreases sharply as the gap distance falls in μm range. The other reason is the large electric field enhancement factor （β） and the high density of surface defects, which cause a highly non-uniform electric field for field emission to occur.
Nerve tracts interruption is one of the major reasons for dysfunction after spiral cord injury. The microelectronic neural bridge is a method to restore function of interrupted neural pathways, by making use of microelectronic chips to bypass the injured nerve tracts. A low-power fully integrated microelectronic neural bridge chip is designed, using CSMC 0.5-μm CMOS technology. The structure and the key points in the circuit design will be introduced in detail. In order to meet the requirement for implantation, the circuit was modified to avoid the use of off-chip components, and fully monolithic integration is achieved. The operating voltage of the circuit is 4-2.5 V, and the chip area is 1.21×1.18 mm2. According to the characteristic of neural signal, the time-domain method is used in testing. The pass bandwidth of the microelectronic neural bridge system covers the whole frequency range of the neural signal, power consumption is 4.33 mW, and the gain is adjustable. The design goals are achieved.
