Hot-electron induced excess carriers in MOSFET´s

The existence of minority carriers in the substrate of n-channel MOSFET´s operating in the saturation region is shown to be induced by turn-on of the source-substrate junction and photon generation. The two mechanisms are demonstrated experimentally and the photon-generation mechanism is further illustrated on a p-well CMOS wafer. Photon generation poses a constraint in VLSI dynamic RAM design.