Description:
Recently, to stabilize the operation of plasma-coupled device shift registers (PCD-SR), a emitter probe structure mounted on the PCD's emitter has been invented. The probe protrudes in the anti-transfer direction, and serves to pick up the lowered potential of the substrate around the preceding ON-PCD element. In this paper, the effect of the probe structure is investigated in detail, and a new quantitative probe model for the plasma coupling phenomenon is proposed. Especially with this model, it is considered that the deformation phenomenon of the Conductivity Modulation Region (CMR) induced by the probe current injection increases the coupling resistance. Using this model, the theory of the operation of the PCD-SR with the emitter probe structure is developed, and it is confirmed that this theory explains the experimental results.