The Designer's Guide Community
Forum
Welcome, Guest. Please Login or Register. Please follow the Forum guidelines.
Aug 16th, 2024, 2:34pm
Pages: 1
Send Topic Print
What's the purpose of short-circuiting Drain and Source on a PMOS transistor? (Read 1412 times)
mowiehowie
Junior Member
**
Offline



Posts: 26

What's the purpose of short-circuiting Drain and Source on a PMOS transistor?
Feb 18th, 2009, 10:50pm
 
I have faced a circuit with some transistors in this way...
Back to top
 
 
View Profile   IP Logged
vivkr
Community Fellow
*****
Offline



Posts: 780

Re: What's the purpose of short-circuiting Drain and Source on a PMOS transistor?
Reply #1 - Feb 18th, 2009, 11:03pm
 
There are several possibilities:

(a) The PMOS is used as a MOS capacitor. The gate is connected in this case to some other point.

(b) Only the diode between the diffusion and bulk is of interest. In this case, one may even short the gate to the drain/source.

(c) The PMOS is just a dummy device which could be added in parallel to existing PMOS current mirror branches.

(d) Someone made a cascode current source and later figured out they didn't need the cascode device or couldn't use for swing reasons, and shorted the drain/source connection with a metal mask change.

(e) A trivial attempt to confound people doing reverse engineering Wink

Regards,

Vivek
Back to top
 
 
View Profile   IP Logged
Pages: 1
Send Topic Print
Copyright 2002-2024 Designer’s Guide Consulting, Inc. Designer’s Guide® is a registered trademark of Designer’s Guide Consulting, Inc. All rights reserved. Send comments or questions to editor@designers-guide.org. Consider submitting a paper or model.