Impact of pre-annealing process on electrical properties and stability of indium zinc oxide thin-film transistors
Han-Lin Zhao, Gergely Tarsoly, Fei Shan, Xiaolin Wang, Jae‐Yun Lee, Yong Jin Jeong, Sung‐Jin Kim
Abstract
Abstract This paper examined the effects of no treatment versus plasma treatment, and femtosecond laser irradiation as pre-annealing processes on indium zinc oxide (IZO) films and annealing at high temperatures. The plasma pre-annealed multilayer stacked IZO TFTs showed better electrical properties with mobility enhancement from 2.45 to 7.81 cm 2 /Vs, but exhibited diminished on–off current ratio (I on /I off ). The IZO thin-film transistor (TFT) prepared with femtosecond laser pre-annealing with low pulse energy generation (power of 3 W at 700 nm wavelength) for 100 s has also exhibited significantly improved electrical performance, the saturation mobility increased to 4.91 cm 2 /Vs, the I on /I off ratio was enhanced from 4.5 × 10 5 to 2.1 × 10 6 , the threshold voltage improved from − 1.44 to − 0.25 V, and the subthreshold swing was reduced from 1.21 to 0.61 V/dec. In conclusion, IZO TFTs with improved performance can be prepared using a femtosecond laser pre-annealing process, which has great potential for fabricating low-cost, high-performance devices.