components - Why are discrete four-terminal MOSFETs so hard to find?

I know that a MOSFET is a four-terminal device, but nearly every discrete MOSFET you can buy has its bulk/body/substrate internally connected to the source. Why is this? It makes it inconvenient to use in certain types of circuit, for example when breadboarding a basic IC design (for instructional purposes) in which all the body terminals are connected either to VCC or to ground. Are discrete 4-terminal MOSFETs just not that useful? Or is there some easy way to simulate them with a few 3-terminal MOSFETs?

Answer

Although the FETs in on a monolithic chip are symmetric, many discrete FETs have a very different structure which tries to maximize the usable surface area as well as source/drain connectivity. The bulk substrate connection on a transistor or chip has excellent current-handling capability, and if one were designing an NMOS LSI chip in which every single transistor needed to have its source or drain tied to a common point, performance would probably be optimized by having the substrate serve as the source or drain for all the transistors. Most chips, however, use the bulk connection as a common base, wasting its current-handling abilities, but allowing the source and drain connections of each transistor to be independent.

A typical "discrete" MOSFET will in fact be not one transistor, but dozens or hundreds of transistors in parallel. Because all the transistors are supposed to have their drains tied together, using the substrate as the drain won't cause the same design problems as it would in an LSI chip. Since the substrate can be very well solidly connected to an outside terminal, such a design will both improve drain conductivity, and also eliminate the need to use top-side metal for the drain connection, thus allowing the use of more metal to connect the sources. Unfortunately, if the transistors are arranged so that all their sources form a "mesh" (good for connectivity), that will leave their bases as isolated islands. While it would be possible to run metal tracks to connect all the bases together, doing so would require either subdividing the source-connected metal into many strips (degrading performance) or adding an extra metal layer and an extra insulating layer (significantly increasing cost). Since each base section has the metal layer for the source connection sitting directly above it, it's much easier to simply have have the bases as well as the sources connect to that.