Abstract
Poly-Si TFT's(Polysilicon thin filmtransistors) have been actively studied due to their applications in active matrix liquid crystal displays and active pull-up devices of CMOS SRAM's. For such applications, the leakage current has to be in the range of sub-picoampere. However, poly-Si TFT's suffer from anomalous high leakage currents, which is attributed to the emission of the traps present at gain boundaries in the drain junction. The leakage current has been analyzed by the field emission via grain-boundary traps and thermionic field emission over potential barrier located at the grain boundary. We found that the models proposed before are not consistent with the experimental results at far as drain-offset poly-Si TFT's we fabricated concern. In this paper, leakage current of drain-offset poly-Si TFT's with different offset lengths was studied. A conduction model based on the thermionic emission of the tunneling electrons is developed to identify the leakage mechanism. It was found that the effective grain size of the drain-offset region is important factor in the leakage current. A good agreement between experimental and simulated results of the leakage current is obtained.
