Self-aligned Offset Gated Poly-Si TFTs by Employing a Photo Resistor Reflow Process

Photo Resistor Reflow 방법을 이용한 오프셋 마스크를 이용하지 않는 새로운 자기 정합 폴리 실리콘 박막 트랜지스터

A large leakage current may be one of the critical issues for poly-silicon thin film transistors(poly-Si TFTs) for LCD applications. In order to reduce the leakage current of poly-Si TFTs, several offset gated structures have been reported. However, those devices, where the offset length in the source region is not same as that in the drain region, exhibit the asymmetric electrical performances such as the threshold voltage shift and the variation of the subthreshold slope. The different offset length is caused by the additional mask step for the conventional offset structures. Also the self-aligned implantation may not be applicable due to the mis-alignment problem. In this paper, we propose a new fabrication method for poly-Si TFTs with a self-aligned offset gated structure by employing a photo resistor reflow process. Compared with the conventional poly-Si TFTs, the device is consist of two gate electrodes, of which one is the entitled main gate where the gate bias is employed and the other is the entitled subgate which is separate from both sides of the main gate. The poly-Si channel layer below the offset oxide is protected from the injected ion impurities for the source/drain implantation and acts as an offset region of the proposed device. The key feature of our new device is the offset lesion due to the offset oxide. Our experimental results show that the offset region, due to the photo resistor reflow process, has been successfully obtained in order to fabricate the offset gated poly-Si TFTs. The advantages of the proposed device are that the offset length in the source region is the same as that in the drain region because of the self-aligned implantation and the proposed device does not require any additional mask process step.