Electrical Characterization of Amorphous Zn-Sn-O Transistors Deposited through RF-Sputtering

Flat-panel displays have been growing as an essential everyday product in the current information/communication ages in the unprecedented speed. The forward-coming applications require light-weightness, higher speed, higher resolution, and lower power consumption, along with the relevant cost. Such specifications demand for a new concept-based materials and applications, unlike Si-based technologies, such as amorphous Si and polycrystalline Si thin film transistors. Since the introduction of the first concept on the oxide-based thin film transistors by Hosono et al., amorphous oxide thin film transistors have been gaining academic/industrial interest, owing to the facile synthesis and reproducible processing despite of a couple of shortcomings. The current work places its main emphasis on the binary oxides composed of ZnO and SnO2. RF sputtering was applied to the fabrication of amorphous oxide thin film devices, in the form of bottom-gated structures involving highly-doped Si wafers as gate materials and thermal oxide (SiO2) as gate dielectrics. The physical/chemical features were characterized using atomic force microscopy for surface morphology, spectroscopic ellipsometry for optical parameters, X-ray diffraction for crystallinity, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy for identification of chemical states. The combined characterizations on Zn-Sn-O thin films are discussed in comparison with the device performance based on thin film transistors involving Zn-Sn-O thin films as channel materials, with the aim to optimizing high-performance thin film transistors.