220-A3.1

Activity: MOSFET Characteristic Curves

• Instructions: This activity is structured as a tutorial with an activity at the end. Should you have any questions, clarifications, or issues, please contact your instructor as soon as possible.
• At the end of this activity, the student should be able to:

1. Generate the characteristic curves of NMOS and PMOS transistors.

MOS Transfer Characteristics

Figure 1: A circuit to obtain the V-I characteristics of an NMOS transistor.

The transfer characteristics of an NMOS transistor is the relationship between the gate-source voltage, which serves as the "input" port of a common-source amplifier, and the "output" drain current. To simulate the transfer characteristic of our 45nm NMOS PTM model, we can use this SPICE file and this Python script.

To identify the different operating regions, we can

Figure 2: The NMOS transfer characteristics.

Figure 3: The NMOS transfer characteristics on a log scale.

MOS Output Characteristics

Figure 4: The NMOS output characteristics.