• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.02a
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• pp.341-341
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• 2012

Recently, oxide semi-conductor materials have been investigated as promising candidates replacing a-Si:H and poly-Si semiconductor because they have some advantages of a room-temperature process, low-cost, high performance and various applications in flexible and transparent electronics. Particularly, amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) is an interesting semiconductor material for use in flexible thin film transistor (TFT) fabrication due to the high carrier mobility and low deposition temperatures. In this work, we demonstrated improvement of flexibility in IGZO TFTs, which were fabricated on polyimide (PI) substrate. At first, a thin poly-4vinyl phenol (PVP) layer was spin coated on PI substrate for making a smooth surface up to 0.3 nm, which was required to form high quality active layer. Then, Ni gate electrode of 100 nm was deposited on the bare PVP layer by e-beam evaporator using a shadow mask. The PVP and $Al_2O_3$ layers with different thicknesses were used for organic/inorganic multi gate dielectric, which were formed by spin coater and atomic layer deposition (ALD), respectively, at $200^{\circ}C$. 70 nm IGZO semiconductor layer and 70 nm Al source/drain electrodes were respectively deposited by RF magnetron sputter and thermal evaporator using shadow masks. Then, IGZO layer was annealed on a hotplate at $200^{\circ}C$ for 1 hour. Standard electrical characteristics of transistors were measured by a semiconductor parameter analyzer at room temperature in the dark and performance of devices then was also evaluated under static and dynamic mechanical deformation. The IGZO TFTs incorporating hybrid gate dielectrics showed a high flexibility compared to the device with single structural gate dielectrics. The effects of mechanical deformation on the TFT characteristics will be discussed in detail.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2006.08a
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• pp.695-698
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• 2006

The photosensitive poly-siloxane material used as the passivation layers for the conventional back channel etched (BCE) thin film transistors (TFTs) has been investigated. Through the organic material, the TFT array fabrication process can be reduced and higher aperture ratio can be achieved for higher LCD panel performance. The interface between the organic passivation layer and the back channel of the amorphous active region has been improved by the back channel oxygen treatment and the devices exhibits lower leakage current than the conventional silicon nitride passivation layer of BCE TFTs. The leakage currents between Indium-tin-oxide (ITO) pixels and the TFT devices and its mechanism have also been investigated in this paper.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2002.08a
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• pp.575-578
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• 2002

In this work, the electrical characteristics of organic thin film transistors with the surface-treated organic gate insulator have been studied. For the surface treatment, the photoalignment technique was used. The field effect mobilities of the devices with PVP gate insulator was improved about ten times as high as those of TFTs without the insulator surface treatment.

• Journal of Information Display
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.80-86
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• 2009

The variation of the electrical characteristics of thin-film transistors (TFTs) causes a non-uniform image quality problem, and the differential aging of organic light-emitting diode (OLED) devices causes an image-sticking problem. A video data correction method is proposed herein as an effective solution to the non-uniform electro-optical characteristics of the pixels in activematrix organic light-emitting diode (AMOLED) displays. The results of the simulation that was conducted show that the proposed method successfully senses the electrical characteristics of TFTs and the degradation of OLEDs and effectively compensates for them.

• Journal of the Semiconductor & Display Technology
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.141-145
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• 2021

The brightness of the Organic Light Emitting Diode (OLED) display is controlled by thin-film transistors (TFTs). Regardless of the materials and the structures of TFTs, an OLED suffers from the instable threshold voltage (V_th) of a TFT during operation. When designing an OLED pixel with circuit simulation tool such as SPICE, a designer needs to take V_th shift into account to improve the reliability of the circuit and various compensation methods have been proposed. In this paper, the effect of the compensation circuits from two typical OLED pixel circuits proposed in the literature are studied by the transient simulation with a SPICE tool in which the stretched-exponential time dependent V_th shift function is implemented. The simulation results show that the compensation circuits improve the reliability at the beginning of each frame, but V_th shifts from all TFTs in a pixel need to be considered to improve long-time reliability.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2009.06a
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• pp.151-151
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• 2009

Recently, there has been increasing interest in amorphous oxide semiconductors to find alternative materials for an amorphous silicon or organic semiconductor layer as a channel in thin film transistors(TFTs) for transparent electronic devices owing to their high mobility and low photo-sensitivity. The fabriction of amorphous oxide-based TFTs at room temperature on plastic substrates is a key technology to realize transparent flexible electronics. Amorphous oxides allows for controllable conductivity, which permits it to be used both as a transparent semiconductor or conductor, and so to be used both as active and source/drain layers in TFTs. One of the materials that is being responsible for this revolution in the electronics is indium-zinc-tin oxide(IZTO). Since this is relatively new material, it is important to study the properties of room-temperature deposited IZTO thin films and exploration in a possible integration of the material in flexible TFT devices. In this research, we deposited IZTO thin films on polyethylene naphthalate substrate at room temperature by using magnetron sputtering system and investigated their properties. Furthermore, we revealed the fabrication and characteristics of top-gate-type transparent TFTs with IZTO layers, seen in Fig. 1. The experimental results show that by varying the oxygen flow rate during deposition, it can be prepared the IZTO thin films of two-types; One a conductive film that exhibits a resistivity of $2\times10^{-4}$ ohm${\cdot}$cm; the other, semiconductor film with a resistivity of 9 ohm${\cdot}$cm. The TFT devices with IZTO layers are optically transparent in visible region and operate in enhancement mode. The threshold voltage, field effect mobility, on-off current ratio, and sub-threshold slope of the TFT are -0.5 V, $7.2\;cm^2/Vs$, $\sim10^7$ and 0.2 V/decade, respectively. These results will contribute to applications of select TFT to transparent flexible electronics.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers
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• v.28 no.6
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• pp.351-359
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• 2015

Next-generation displays should be transparent and flexible as well as having high resolution and frame number. The main factor for active matrix organic light emitting diode and next-generation displays is the development of TFTs (thin-film transistors) with high mobility and large area uniformity. The TFTs used for transparent displays are mainly oxide TFT that has oxide semiconductor as channel layer. Zinc-oxide based substances such as indium-gallium-zinc-oxide has attracted attention in the display industry. In this paper, the mobility improvement of low cost oxide TFT is studied for fast operating next-generation displays by overcoming disadvantages of amorphous silicon TFT that has low mobility and poly silicon TFT that requires expensive equipment for complex process and doping process.

• Journal of Information Display
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• v.10 no.2
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• pp.54-61
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• 2009

The results of the optimization of the organic passivation process for fabricating thin-film transistors (TFTs) with a high aperture ratio on a seventh-generation glass (2200${\times}$1870 mm) substrate for LCD-TV panels are reported herein. The optimization of the organic passivation process has been verified by checking various factors, including the material properties (e.g., thickness, stain, etching, thermal reflow) and the effects on the TFT operation (e.g., gate/data line delay and display-driving properties). The two main factors influencing the organic passivation process are the optimization of the final thickness of the organic passivation layer, and the gate electrode. In conclusion, the minimum possible final thickness was found to be $2.42{\um}m$ via simulation and pilot testing, using the full-factorial design. The optimization of the organic passivation layer was accomplished by improving its brightness by over 10 cd/$m^2$ (ca. 2% luminance) compared to that of the conventional organic passivation process. The results of this research also help reduce the reddish stain on display panels.

• Transactions on Electrical and Electronic Materials
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.155-158
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• 2017

In this paper, ZnO Thin Film Transistors (TFTs) were fabricated by a sol-gel method using a low-temperature process, and their physical and electrical characteristics were analyzed. To lower the process temperature to $200^{\circ}C$, we used a zinc nitrate hydrate ($Zn(NO_3)_2{\cdot}xH_2O$) precursor. Thermo Gravimetric Analyzer (TGA) analysis showed that the zinc nitrate hydrate precursor solution had 1.5% residual organics, much less than the 6.5% of zinc acetate dihydrate at $200^{\circ}C$. In the sol-gel method, organic materials in the precursor disrupt formation of a high-quality film, and high-temperature annealing is needed to remove the organic residuals, which implies that, by using zinc nitrate hydrate, ZnO devices can be fabricated at a much lower temperature. Using an X-Ray Diffractometer (XRD) and an X-ray Photoelectron Spectrometer (XPS), $200^{\circ}C$ annealed ZnO film with zinc nitrate hydrate (ZnO (N)) was found to have an amorphous phase and much more oxygen vacancy ($V_o$) than Zn-O bonds. Despite no crystallinity, the ZnO (N) had conductance comparable to that of ZnO with zinc acetate dihydrate (ZnO (A)) annealed at $500^{\circ}C$ as in TFTs. These results show that sol-gel could be made a potent process for low-cost and flexible device applications by optimizing the precursors.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Electrical and Electronic Material Engineers Conference
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• 2008.06a
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• pp.95-96
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• 2008

A new voltage-driven pixel circuit using soluble-processed organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) for an active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) is proposed. The proposed circuit is composed of four switching TFTs, one driving TFT and one storage capacitor. The proposed circuit can compensate for the degradation of OLED current caused by the threshold voltage shift of the OTFT. The simulation results show that the variation of OLED current corresponding to a 3V threshold voltage shift is decreased by 30% compared to the conventional 2TlC structure.