Displacement Sensor with Inherent Read-Out Circuit Using Water-Gated Field Effect Transistor (WG-FET)

Abstract

This paper presents, for the first time, a displacement sensor with inherent read-out circuit using an inverter built with WG-FET that has 16-nm-thick single crystalline silicon film. In WG-FET, electrical double layer (EDL) capacitances are formed at water/silicon and water/top gate interfaces. These two capacitances and the resistance of the de-ionized (DI) water droplet build a first order RC network. Propagation delay of an inverter built with WG-FET depends on this RC constant. When the distance between top gate and silicon film changes, EDL capacitances remain the same, but resistance of the DI-water droplet changes. Accordingly, propagation delay of the inverter changes linearly with this distance. Increasing the distance from 400 µm to 1200 µm changes low-to-high propagation delay tplh of the inverter from 1.08 ms to 1.36 ms and high-to-low propagation delay tphl from 0.48 ms to 0.56 ms, which yields sensitivities of 0.35 µs/µm and 0.1 µs/µm, respectively.