Metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor humidity sensor using surface conductance

This letter presents a metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistor based humidity sensor which does not use any specific materials to sense the relative humidity. We simply make use of the low pressure chemical vapor deposited (LPCVD) silicon dioxide's surface conductance change. When the gate is biased and then floated, the electrical charge in the gate is dissipated through the LPCVD silicon dioxide's surface to the surrounding ground with a time constant depending on the surface conductance which, in turn, varies with humidity. With this method, extremely high sensitivity was achieved-the charge dissipation speed increased thousand times as the relative humidity increased. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.3691936]