Photon-effect transistor

Abstract

A two-terminal photon-effect transistor (PET) is described that simplifies the photo sensing pixel by combing photodiode and field effect transistor dual functions into one simple but effective unit. Photons excite electrons from the valance band of semiconducting material as the electrode-free gate to modulate resistivity between source and drain, which directly results in current amplification of photo signal without traditional photo-electrical conversion and electrical amplification dual processes. PET possesses significance in both structural simplification and functional enhancement. As an implementing example of PET, a nanowire camera (NC) with large sensing area and extremely high resolution is fabricated by integrating millions of vertically aligned nanowire arrays in-between of orthogonal top and bottom nano-stripe electrodes. Each nanowire works as independent three-dimensional (3D) PET pixel, enabling the NC an ultra-high resolution and much simplified architecture. NC has pixel size of 50 nm which is two orders higher than existing CCD and CMOS image sensors.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.