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US 6,441,395 B1Granted
Column-row addressable electric microswitch arrays and sensor matrices employing them
AssigneeUniax Corporation
InventorsGang Yu, Yong Cao
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AssigneeUniax Corporation
InventorsGang Yu, Yong Cao
Estimating the term…
The present invention relates generally to fabricating two-terminal electric microswitches comprising thin semiconductor films and using these microswitches to construct column-row (x-y) addressable microswitch matrices. These microswitches are two terminal devices through which electric current and electric potential (or their derivatives or integrals) can be switched on and off by the magnitude or the polarity of the external bias. The microswitches are made from semiconducting thin films in a electrode/semiconductor/electrode, thin film configuration. Column-row addressable electric microswitch matrices can be made in large areas, with high pixel density. Such matrices can be integrated with a sensor layer with electronic properties which vary in response to external physical conditions (such as photon radiation, temperature, pressure, magnetic field and so on), thereby forming a variety of detector matrices.
A microswitch array comprising a plurality of electric microswitches, each member of the plurality of microswitches being in first electrode/semiconductor/second electrode layer form with the semiconductor layer being a unit body shared by the members of the array, wherein each of the electric microswitches has an I-V characteristic with an asymmetric shape as shown in FIGS. 5A, 6A, 7A, 8A, 9A, 10A, 10B or 10C.
A multi-element voltage-switchable sensor array comprising a microswitch array comprising a plurality of electric microswitches, each member of the plurality of microswitches being in first electrode/semiconductor/second electrode layer form with the semiconductor layer being a unit body shared by the members of the array, with individual elements of the array connected in series with individual members of a plurality of sensor elements, said sensor elements producing an electrical signal in response to a stimulus being sensed.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.