• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.11a
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• pp.5-5
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• 2009

Thin-film-transistors (TFTs) that can be prepared at low temperatures have attracted much attention because of the great potential for transparent and flexible electronics. One of the mainstreams in this field is the use of organic semiconductors such as pentacene. But device performance of the organic TFTs is still limited due to low field-effect mobility and rapid degradation after exposing to air. Alternative approach is the use of amorphous oxide semiconductors as a channel. Amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) based TFTs showed the fast technological development, because AOS films can be fabricated at room temperature and exhibit the possibility in application like flexible display, electronic paper, and larges solar cells. Among the various AOSs, a-IGZO has lots of advantages because it has high channel mobility, uniform surface roughness and good transparency. [1] The high mobility is attributed to the overlap of spherical s-orbital of the heavy post-transition metal cations. This study demonstrated the effect of the variation in channel thickness from 30nm to 200nm on the TFT device performance. When the thickness was increased, turn-on voltage and subthreshold swing was decreased. The a-IGZO channels and source/drain metals were deposited with shadow mask. The a-IGZO channel layer was deposited on $SiO_2$/p-Si substrates by RF magnetron sputtering, where RF power is 150W. And working pressure is 3m Torr, at $O_2/Ar$ (2/28 sccm) atmosphere. The electrodes were formed with electron-beam evaporated Ti (30 nm) and Au (70 nm) bilayer. Finally, Al (150nm) as a gate metal was thermal-evaporated. TFT devices were heat-treated in a furnace at 250 $^{\circ}C$ and nitrogen atmosphere for 1hour. The electrical properties of the TFTs were measured using a probe-station. The TFT with channel thickness of 150nm exhibits a good subthreshold swing (SS) of 0.72 V/decade and on-off ratio of $1{\times}10^8$. The field effect mobility and threshold voltage were evaluated as 7.2 and 8 V, respectively.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.137-137
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• 2009

Thin-film transistors (TFTs) that can be prepared at low temperatures have attracted much attention due to the great potential for flexible electronics. One of the mainstreams in this field is the use of organic semiconductors such as pentacene. But device performance of the organic TFTs is still limited by low field effect mobility or rapidly degraded after exposing to air in many cases. Another approach is amorphous oxide semiconductors. Amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) have exactly attracted considerable attention because AOSs were fabricated at room temperature and used lots of application such as flexible display, electronic paper, large solar cells. Among the various AOSs, a-IGZO was considerable material because it has high mobility and uniform surface and good transparent. The high mobility is attributed to the result of the overlap of spherical s-orbital of the heavy pest-transition metal cations. This study is demonstrated the effect of thickness channel layer from 30nm to 200nm. when the thickness was increased, turn on voltage and subthreshold swing were decreased. a-IGZO TFTs have used a shadow mask to deposit channel and source/drain(S/D). a-IGZO were deposited on SiO2 wafer by rf magnetron sputtering. using power is 150W, working pressure is 3m Torr, and an O2/Ar(2/28 SCCM) atmosphere at room temperature. The electrodes were formed with Electron-beam evaporated Ti(30nm) and Au(70nm) structure. Finally, Al(150nm) as a gate metal was evaporated. TFT devices were heat treated in a furnace at $250^{\circ}C$ in nitrogen atmosphere for an hour. The electrical properties of the TFTs were measured using a probe-station to measure I-V characteristic. TFT whose thickness was 150nm exhibits a good subthreshold swing(S) of 0.72 V/decade and high on-off ratio of 1E+08. Field effect mobility, saturation effect mobility, and threshold voltage were evaluated 7.2, 5.8, 8V respectively.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.620-621
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• 2008

Transparent electronics has been one of the key terminologies forecasting the ubiquitous technology era. Several researchers have thus extensively developed transparent oxide-based thin-film transistors (TFTs) on glass and plastic substrates although in general high voltage operating devices have been mainly studied considering transparent display drivers. However, low voltage operating oxide TFTs with transparent electrodes are very necessary if we are aiming at logic circuit applications, for which transparent complementary or one-type channel inverters are required. The most effective and low power consuming inverter should be a form of complementary p-channel and n-channel transistors but real application of those complementary TFT inverters also requires electrical- and even photo-stabilities. Since p-type oxide TFTs have not been developed yet, we previously adopted organic pentacene TFTs for the p-channel while ZnO TFTs were chosen for n-channel on sputter-deposited $AlO_x$ film. As a result, decent inverting behavior was achieved but some electrical gate instability was unavoidable at the ZnO/$AlO_x$ channel interface. Here, considering such gate instability issues we have designed a unique transparent complementary TFT (CTFTs) inverter structure with top n-ZnO channel and bottom p-pentacene channel based on 12 nm-thin nano-oxide/self assembled monolayer laminated dielectric, which has a large dielectric strength comparable to that of thin film amorphous $Al_2O_3$. Our transparent CTFT inverter well operate under 3 V, demonstrating a maximum voltage gain of ~20, good electrical and even photoelectric stabilities. The device transmittance was over 60 % and this type of transparent inverter has never been reported, to the best of our limited knowledge.

• Proceedings of the Materials Research Society of Korea Conference
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• 2009.05a
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• pp.13.1-13.1
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• 2009

Transparent electronics has attracted many interests, for it can open new applications for consumer electronics, transportation, business, and military. Among them, display backplane, thin film transistor (TFT) array would be the most attractive application. Many researchers have been investigating oxide semiconductors for transparent channel material of TFT since the report for transparent amorphous oxide semiconductor (TAOS) TFT by Hosono group and ZnO TFT by Wager group. Especially, oxide TFTs have been intensively investigated during a couple of years since the first demonstration of ZnO-TFT driving AM-OLED. Many papers regarding the fabrication and performance of oxide TFTs, and active matrix display driven by oxide TFTs have been reported. Now lots of people have confidence in the competitiveness of oxide TFTs for the backplane of AM-Display. Especially, high mobility, uniformity, fairly good stability, and low cost process make oxide TFTs applied even to a large size AM-OLED. Last year, Samsung mobile display, former SID, reported 12" AM-OLED driven by IZGO-TFT and it seems that the remained issue for the mass production is the bias temperature stability. Here, we will introduce the application of oxide TFT and important issue for oxide TFT to be used for the direct printing.

• Journal of Information Display
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• v.9 no.4
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• pp.21-29
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• 2008

We studied both the wavelength and intensity dependent photo-responses (photofield-effect) in amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs). During the a-IGZO TFT illumination with the wavelength range from $460\sim660$ nm (visible range), the off-state drain current $(I_{DS_off})$ only slightly increased while a large increase was observed for the wavelength below 400 nm. The observed results are consistent with the optical gap of $\sim$3.05eV extracted from the absorption measurement. The a-IGZO TFT properties under monochromatic illumination ($\lambda$=420nm) with different intensity was also investigated and $I_{DS_off}$ was found to increase with the light intensity. Throughout the study, the field-effect mobility $(\mu_{eff})$ is almost unchanged. But due to photo-generated charge trapping, a negative threshold voltage $(V_{th})$ shift is observed. The mathematical analysis of the photofield-effect suggests that a highly efficient UV photocurrent conversion process in TFT off-region takes place. Finally, a-IGZO mid-gap density-of-states (DOS) was extracted and is more than an order of magnitude lower than reported value for hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H), which can explain a good switching properties observed for a-IGZO TFTs.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.207-207
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• 2011

Amorphous transparent oxide semiconductors (a-TOS) have been widely studied for many optoelectronic devices such as AM-OLED (active-matrix organic light emitting diodes). Recently, Nomura et al. demonstrated high performance amorphous IGZO (In-Ga-Zn-O) TFTs.1 Despite the amorphous structure, due to the conduction band minimum (CBM) that made of spherically extended s-orbitals of the constituent metals, an a-IGZO TFT shows high mobility.2,3 But IGZO films contain high cost rare metals. Therefore, we need to investigate the alternatives. Because Aluminum has a high bond enthalpy with oxygen atom and Alumina has a high lattice energy, we try to replace Gallium with Aluminum that is high reserve low cost material. In this study, we focused on the electrical properties of IZO:Al thin films as a channel layer of TFTs. IZO:Al were deposited on unheated non-alkali glass substrates (5 cm ${\times}$ 5 cm) by magnetron co-sputtering system with two cathodes equipped with IZO target and Al target, respectively. The sintered ceramic IZO disc (3 inch ${\phi}$, 5 mm t) and metal Al target (3 inch ${\phi}$, 5 mm t) are used for deposition. The O2 gas was used as the reactive gas to control carrier concentration and mobility. Deposition was carried out under various sputtering conditions to investigate the effect of sputtering process on the characteristics of IZO:Al thin films. Correlation between sputtering factors and electronic properties of the film will be discussed in detail.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.301.2-301.2
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• 2016

Metal-oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs) have gained a considerable interest in transparent electronics owing to their high optical transparency and outstanding electrical performance even in an amorphous state. Also, these metal-oxide materials can be solution-processed at a low temperature by using deep ultraviolet (DUV) induced photochemical activation allowing facile integration on flexible substrates [1]. In addition, high-dielectric constant (k) inorganic gate dielectrics are also of a great interest as a key element to lower the operating voltage and as well as the formation of coherent interface with the oxide semiconductors, which may lead to a considerable improvement in the TFT performance. In this study, we investigated the electrical properties of solution-processed high-k strontium-doped AlOx (Sr-AlOx) gate dielectrics. Using the Sr-AlOx as a gate dielectric, indium-gallium-zinc oxide (IGZO) TFTs were fabricated and their electrical properties are analyzed. We demonstrate IGZO TFTs with a 10-nm-thick Sr-AlOx gate dielectric which can be operated at a low voltage (~5 V).

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.234-240
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• 2015

Amorphous oxide-based thin-film transistors (TFTs) have drawn a lot of attention recently for the next-generation high-resolution display industry. The required field-effect mobility of oxide-based TFTs has been increasing rapidly to meet the demands of the high-resolution, large panel size and 3D displays in the market. In this regard, the current status and major trends in the high mobility oxide-based TFTs are briefly reviewed. The various approaches, including the use of semiconductor, dielectric, electrode materials and the corresponding device structures for realizing high mobility oxide-based TFT devices are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.30 no.7
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• pp.437-440
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• 2017

We report on amorphous thin-film transistors (TFTs) with indium zinc oxide (IZO) channel layers that were fabricated via a solution process. We prepared the IZO semiconductor solution with 0.1 M indium nitrate hydrate and 0.1 M zinc acetate dehydrate as precursor solutions. The solution- processed IZO TFTs showed good performance: a field-effect mobility of $7.29cm^2/Vs$, a threshold voltage of 4.66 V, a subthreshold slope of 0.48 V/dec, and a current on-to-off ratio of $1.62{\times}10^5$. To investigate the static response of our solution-processed IZO TFTs, simple resistor load-type inverters were fabricated by connecting a $2-M{\Omega}$ resistor. Our IZOTFTbased N-MOS inverter performed well at operating voltage, and therefore, isa good candidate for advanced logic circuits and display backplane.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.07a
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• pp.272-275
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• 2005

The high stability of a-Si:H TFTs device is studied with different deposited conditions of $SiN_x$ films by PECVD. The process parameters of $N_2$, $NH_3$ gas flow rate, RF power, and pressure s of hydrogenated amorphous silicon nitride are taken into account and analyzed by Taguchi experimental design method. The $NH_3$ gas flow rate and RF power are two major factors on the average threshold voltage and the a-SiNx:H film's structure. The hydrogen contents in $SiN_x$ films were measured by FTIR using the related Si-H/N-H bonds ratio in $a-SiN_x:H$ films. After the 330,000 sec gate bias stress is applied, the threshold voltages ($V_th$) shift less than 10%. This result indicates that the highly stable a-Si:H TFTs device can be fabricated with optimum gate $SiN_x$ insulator.