Giant microwave photoconductance of short channel MOSFETs

We study microwave photoresponse of a short p-channel MOSFET in the subthreshold regime at temperatures from room to helium. We observe large (several times) enhancement of the MOSFET conductance at 300 K, an order at 77 K, and giant (up to 4–5 orders of magnitude) at 4.2 K. It is shown that this giant enhancement is mainly due to microwave-induced hole tunneling between the MOSFET source and drain. The result obtained exhibits real possibility of developing substantially different kind of microwave radiation detectors fabricated on the basis of ordinary MOS-technology.