Today, I’m gonna talk about something I messed around with recently – MOSFET floating gates. I started off just reading up on it a bit, you know, just to get a feel for what it’s all about. I found out that it’s basically a way to store charge, kinda like a tiny battery in your chip. Pretty cool, right?
So, the first thing I did was to grab a standard MOSFET, you know, the kind you can find in almost any electronics store. I just picked a simple N-channel one. I hooked it up to my trusty breadboard – nothing fancy, just a simple setup to see if I could actually make this thing work.
Next, I needed to figure out how to actually “float” the gate. I mean, the whole point is that it’s not connected to anything, right? So, I used a couple of capacitors to couple some signals to the gate, kind of like sending it messages wirelessly. I played around with the values of these capacitors for a while, trying to get the best results. Turns out, it’s a bit of a balancing act. You want to make sure the gate is isolated enough, but not so much that it doesn’t respond to any inputs at all.
Once I had that sorted, I started experimenting with different ways to charge and discharge the gate. I used a simple voltage source and a resistor to do this. It was kinda like filling up a tiny bucket of electrons and then slowly letting them out. I was careful, I was using a multimeter to measure the voltage on the gate, just to make sure I wasn’t frying anything. The voltage changes were pretty small, but definitely noticeable.
- Get the MOSFET: I grabbed a regular N-channel MOSFET from my parts bin.
- Breadboard it: I stuck the MOSFET on a breadboard, just to make it easier to connect things.
- Capacitor Coupling: I used some capacitors to couple signals to the gate, isolating it from the rest of the circuit.
- Charge and Discharge: I used a voltage source and a resistor to control the charge on the gate.
- Measure: I kept an eye on the gate voltage with my multimeter.
After a few hours of tinkering, I finally got it working the way I wanted. I could reliably charge the gate to a certain voltage and then hold it there for a while. And then, I could discharge it back down. It was a pretty awesome feeling to see it all come together.
The next step, I think, is to try and use this floating gate to actually control something. Maybe I can make it switch a light on and off, or even store some data. The possibilities are pretty endless. I don’t want to get in the way of my work, but I just wanna figure it out. So, this is just the beginning of my floating gate adventures, I will get the idea and make it become true. I will use it to finish something more fun. I love it!
Anyway, that’s my little story about messing around with MOSFET floating gates. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s a fun little project that anyone can try. And who knows, maybe it’ll spark some ideas for your own electronics experiments.