Patent ID: 7217950

Claim:
A tunnel-injection device comprising: a drain region made of a substrate of a first semiconductor; a reception layer made of the first semiconductor disposed on and metallurgically contacted with a top surface of the drain region; a barrier-forming layer made of a second semiconductor having a bandgap energy narrower than the first semiconductor, being in metallurgical contact with the reception layer so as to form a band-edge discontinuity barrier by a heterojunction interface between the first and second semiconductors; a gate insulating film disposed on the barrier-forming layer contacting to the heterojunction interface; a gate electrode disposed on the gate insulating film configured to change a tunneling probability of the carriers, which are configured to be injected into the reception layer by tunneling through the band-edge discontinuity barrier, by controlling a width of the band-edge discontinuity barrier; a carrier-supplying region made of the second semiconductor, being contacted with the barrier-forming layer, configured to supply the carriers to the barrier-forming layer; a source electrode being contacted with the carrier-supplying region; and an insulating film disposed at a limited area of and on a top surface of the reception layer.