how to use the BNC terminals connecting the device and how to connect an external power supply

[Elena12121]

Hi Guys,
I am using the ArcOne to measure my device. I have been struggling to understand how to use the BNC terminals connecting the device and how to connect an external power supply to apply gate voltage. This is less well described in the manual.
The reason I wanted to do this is because the gate of three-terminal device needs a pulsed voltage to detect changes in current resistance across the source and drain.
While I realize that the ArcOne is designed for two-terminal devices，I would like to confirm that if the instrument can be tested in this way, and if the BNC terminal would be of some use?
Any suggestion?

Regards
Elena

[foucault]

Hello! I'm afraid there's no way to use the BNCs as external power supplies in ArC ONE. The active BNCs (the first two of the 4) are essentially hard-wired to the header pins that correspond to wordline/bitline (1, 1) with a relay in the middle that's connected when the instrument is operated in "External BNC" mode to allow to connect to a device via a probe manipulator. The remaining BNC terminals are hardware controlled to either V/2 or V/3 depending on how you configure the tool.

Long story short: if you want to toggle gates you need an external power supply, this is not something the ArC ONE can accomodate with the current hardware.

[Elena12121]

Thank you very much for your reply!
I got to understand the BNC terminals, but a BNC terminal can only be connected to one electrode via a microprobe and two BNC terminals can only test one two-terminal device. If that, how to connect to multiple devices to achieve an array for testing. This is what I don't quite understand at the moment. Could you give me a little help?

[Elena12121]

Another problem was that the hardware device and the PLCC68 we purchased did not connect well enough to measure the resistance of the desired device in the software. We have ruled out the device problem and are not sure what to do next. What do you think is a better solution to the connectivity problem?

[foucault]

BNC terminals can either be used for (a) connect ArC ONE to a single device as you've discovered already (External BNC) and (b) connect an external measurement system and use the ArC ONE only for multiplexing with no measurements done by ArC ONE (BNC to Local). If you want to access many devices using ArC ONE you need to use "Local" mode and a 32×32 probe card to connect to your devices. Then invividuals lines can be accessed through the ArC ONE GUI or libarc1.

As for your second question, one obvious thing is that the socket can only be operated in "Local" mode. Your devices need to be wire-bonded in a specific way to be associated with specific word- and bitlines. See our manual, page 2. If this doesn't answer your question then we'll have to know more of your experiment and devices to advice. In that case this discussion is not about the software stack (for which this forum exists) and I would recommend you contact us via email.