TUNNEL CHANNEL TRANSISTOR AND METHOD OF DRIVING THE SAME

摘要

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide a non-volatile memory which can reflect one of two logical states on the channel current of a tunnel channel transistor and can arbitrarily rewrite the state into any one of the logical states. SOLUTION: By utilizing the fact that a depletion layer formed in a source region 3 to be overlapped with a ferrorelectric layer 6 depends on the polarization state of ferroelectric, when a positive bias is applied to a drain region 4 with respect to the source region 3 to inject electrons from the source region 3 into the drain region 4 via an insulator 5, reading of data depending on the number of electrons emitted from the source region 3 is reflected by the polarization state of the ferroelectric layer 6 under a gate electrode 7. Since the polarization state of the layer 6 is spontaneous, the polarization state can be held (stored) and discriminated (read out) by the channel current of the transistor.