• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2010.02a
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• pp.222-222
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• 2010

Transparent semiconductor oxide thin films have been attracting considerable attention as potential channel layers in thin film transistors (TFTs) owing to their several advantageous electrical and optical characteristics such as high mobility, high stability, and transparency. TFTs with ZnO or similar metal oxide semiconductor thin films as the active layer have already been developed for use in active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED). Of late, there have been several reports on TFTs fabricated with InZnO, AlZnSnO, InGaZnO, or other metal oxide semiconductor thin films as the active channel layer. These newly developed TFTs were expected to have better electrical characteristics than ZnO TFTs. In fact, results of these investigations have shown that TFTs with the new multi-component material have excellent electrical properties. In this work, we present TFTs with inverted coplanar geometry and with a novel HfInZnO active layer co-sputtered at room temperature. These TFTs are meant for use in low voltage, battery-operated mobile and flexible devices. Overall, the TFTs showed good performance: the low sub-threshold swing was low and the $I_{on/off}$ ratio was high.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2011.02a
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• pp.252-253
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• 2011

ZnO-based thin film transistors (TFTs) are of great interest for application in next generation flat panel displays. Most research has been based on amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO) TFTs, rather than single binary oxides, such as ZnO, due to the reproducibility, uniformity, and surface smoothness of the IGZO active channel layer. However, recently, intrinsic ZnO-TFTs have been investigated, and TFT- arrayss have been demonstrated as prototypes of flat-panel displays and electronic circuits. However, ZnO thin films have some significant problems for application as an active channel layer of TFTs; it was easy to change the electrical properties of the i-ZnO thin films under external conditions. The variable electrical properties lead to unstable TFTs device characteristics under bias stress and/or temperature. In order to obtain higher performance and more stable ZnO-based TFTs, HZO thin film was used as an active channel layer. It was expected that HZO-TFTs would have more stable electrical characteristics under gate bias stress conditions because the binding energy of Hf-O is greater than that of Zn-O. For deposition of HZO thin films, Hf would be substituted with Zn, and then Hf could be suppressed to generate oxygen vacancies. In this study, the fabrication of the oxide-based TFTs with HZO active channel layer was reported with excellent stability. Application of HZO thin films as an active channel layer improved the TFT device performance and bias stability, as compared to i-ZnO TFTs. The excellent negative bias temperature stress (NBTS) stability of the device was analyzed using the HZO and i-ZnO TFTs transfer curves acquired at a high temperature (473 K).

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.242-242
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• 2012

Transparent oxide semiconductors are increasingly becoming one of good candidates for high efficient channel materials of thin film transistors (TFTs) in large-area display industries. Compare to the conventional hydrogenated amorphous silicon channel layers, solution processed ZnO-TFTs can be simply fabricated at low temperature by just using a spin coating method without vacuum deposition, thus providing low manufacturing cost. Furthermore, solution based oxide TFT exhibits excellent transparency and enables to apply flexible devices. For this reason, this process has been attracting much attention as one fabrication method for oxide channel layer in thin-film transistors (TFTs). But, poor electrical characteristic of these solution based oxide materials still remains one of issuable problems due to oxygen vacancy formed by breaking weak chemical bonds during fabrication. These electrical properties are expected due to the generation of a large number of conducting carriers, resulting in huge electron scattering effect. Therefore, we study a novel technique to effectively improve the electron mobility by applying environmental annealing treatments with various gases to the solution based Li-doped ZnO TFTs. This technique was systematically designed to vary a different lithium ratio in order to confirm the electrical tendency of Li-doped ZnO TFTs. The observations of Scanning Electron Microscopy, Atomic Force Microscopy, and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy were performed to investigate structural properties and elemental composition of our samples. In addition, I-V characteristics were carried out by using Keithley 4,200-Semiconductor Characterization System (4,200-SCS) with 4-probe system.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.302.1-302.1
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• 2016

Solution-processed amorphous metal-oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs) are considered as promising candidates for the upcoming transparent and flexible electronics due to their transparent property, good performance uniformity and possibility to fabricate at a low-temperature. In addition, solution processing metal oxide TFTs may allow non-vacuum fabrication of flexible electronic which can be more utilizable for easy and low-cost fabrication. Recently, for high-mobility oxide TFTs, multi-layered oxide channel devices have been introduced such as superlattice channel structure and heterojunction structure. However, only a few studies have been mentioned on the bias illumination stress in the multi- layered oxide TFTs. Therefore, in this research, we investigated the effects of bias illumination stress in solution-processed bilayer oxide TFTs which are fabricated by the deep ultraviolet photochemical activation process. For studying the electrical and stability characteristics, we implemented positive bias stress (PBS) and negative bias illumination stress (NBIS). Also, we studied the electrical properties such as field-effect mobility, threshold voltage ($V_T$) and subthreshold slop (SS) to understand effects of the bilayer channel structure.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.07b
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• pp.940-943
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• 2005

The characteristics of a-Si:H TFTs with silicon oxide as passivation layer were reported. It was studied that the insulating characteristics and step coverage characteristics of low temperature silicon oxide before applying to a-Si:H TFT fabrications. With the optimum deposition conditions considering electrical and deposition characteristics, low temperature silicon oxide was applied to a-Si:H TFTs. The changes in characteristics of a-Si:H TFTs were analyzed after replacing silicon nitride passivation layer with low temperature silicon oxide layer. This low temperature silicon oxide can be adapted to high resolution a-Si:H TFT LCD panels.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SD
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• v.49 no.1
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• pp.1-7
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• 2012

We have developed a new gate driver circuit for liquid crystal displays using oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs). In the new gate driver, negative gate bias is applied to turn off the oxide TFTs because the oxide TFT occasionally has negative threshold voltage (VT). In addition, we employed three parallel pull-down TFTs that are turned on in turns to enhance the stability. SPICE simulation showed that the proposed circuit worked successfully covering the VT range of -3 V ~ +6 V And fabrication results confirmed stable operation of the new circuit using oxide TFTs.

• Proceedings of the KIEE Conference
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• 2011.07a
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• pp.25-26
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• 2011

In this paper, we investigated the effect of various annealing processes on the electrical characteristics of oxide thin film transistors (TFTs). When we annealed the TFT devices before and after source/drain (S/D) process, we could observe the different electrical characteristics of oxide TFTs. When we annealed the TFTs after deposition of transparent indium zinc oxide S/D electrodes, the annealing process decreased the contact resistance but increased the resistivity of S/D electrodes. The field effect mobility, subthreshold slope and threshold voltage of the oxide TFTs annealed before and after S/D process were 5.83 and 4.47 $cm^2$/Vs, 1.20 and 0.82 V/dec, and 3.92 and 8.33 V respectively. To analyze the differences, we measured the contact resistances and the carrier concentrations using transfer length method (TLM) and Hall measurement.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2016.02a
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• pp.293.2-293.2
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• 2016

The In this paper, we have fabricated the solution processed In-Ga-ZnO thin film transistors (IGZO TFTs) by varying indium and gallium ratio. The indium ratio of IGZO TFTs was changed from 1 to 5 at fixed gallium and zinc oxide atomic percent of 1:1 and gallium ratio was varied from 1 to 5 at fixed indium and zinc oxide atomic percent of 1:1. When the indium ratio was increased at fixed gallium and zinc oxide ratio of 1:1, threshold voltage was negatively shifted from 1.03 to -6.18 V and also mobility was increased from 0.018 to $0.076cm2/V{\cdot}sec$. It means that the number of carriers in IGZO TFTs were increased due to great formation of the oxygen vacancies which generate electrons. In contrast, when the gallium ratio was increased in IGZO TFTs with indium and zinc oxide ration of 1:1, the on/off current ratio was increased from $1.88{\times}104$ to $2.22{\times}105$. It is because gallium have stronger chemical bonds with oxygen than that with the zinc and indium ions that lead to the decreased in electron concentration.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2009.10a
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• pp.393-395
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• 2009

We fabricated oxide and oxide/organic hybrid TFTs on a glass substrate using the photolithography process under $200^{\circ}C$. We adopt the solution processed organic ferroelectric materials of P(VDF-TrFE) and polyimide (KSPI) insulator for 1-T structure memory and flexible device, respectively. All devices have successfully operated and showed the possibility of hybrid TFTs for the application to the flexible electronic devices.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2012.08a
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• pp.256-256
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• 2012

Oxide semiconductors such as zinc tin oxide (ZTO) or indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) have attracted a lot of research interest owing to their high potential for application as thin film transistors (TFTs) [1,2]. However, the instability of oxide TFTs remains as an obstacle to overcome for practical applications to electronic devices. Several studies have reported that the electrical characteristics of ZnO-based transistors are very sensitive to oxygen, hydrogen, and water [3,4,5]. To improve the reliability issue for the amorphous InGaZnO (a-IGZO) thin-film transistor, back channel passivation layer is essential for the long term bias stability. In this study, we investigated the instability of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO) thin film transistors (TFTs) by the back channel contaminations. The effect of back channel contaminations (humidity or oxygen) on oxide transistor is of importance because it might affect the transistor performance. To remove this environmental condition, we performed vacuum seasoning before the deposition of hybrid passivation layer and acquired improved stability. It was found that vacuum seasoning can remove the back channel contamination if a-IGZO film. Therefore, to achieve highly stable oxide TFTs we suggest that adsorbed chemical gas molecules have to be eliminated from the back-channel prior to forming the passivation layers.