Accelerated formation of metal oxide thin film at 200 °C using oxygen supplied by a nitric acid additive and residual organic suction vacuum annealing for thin-film transistor applications.

Oxide semiconductors have gradually replaced amorphous and polycrystalline silicon for thin-film transistor (TFT) because of their high mobility and large-area uniformity. Especially, the oxide semiconductors have also achieved the low-cost manufacturing using a solution process. However, because the solution-processed oxide semiconductors require a high thermal energy to form the oxide thin film, the additional solution synthesis and annealing process are needed for low-temperature solution process. Because the conventional solution-processed oxide thin films have low oxidation level and high residual organic concentration at low annealing temperature, we propose the novel solution process that includes the nitric acid additive and the vacuum ambient annealing as an oxidizing agent and a residual organic suction, respectively. Therefore, we have successfully developed the simple oxide solution process and the soluble InZnO TFT with high field-effect mobility of 3.38 cm(2)/(V s) at 200 °C.

Improved electrical performance of an oxide thin-film transistor having multistacked active layers using a solution process.

Thin-film transistors (TFTs) with multistacked active layers (MSALs) have been studied to improve their electrical performance. The performance enhancement with MSALs has been attributed to higher film density in the effective channel; the density was higher because the porosities of the sublayers were reduced by filling with solution. The proposed TFT with MSALs exhibited an enhanced field-effect mobility of 2.17 cm(2)/(V s) and a threshold voltage shift under positive bias stress of 8.2 V, compared to 1.21 cm(2)/(V s) and 18.1 V, respectively, for the single active layer TFT.