• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2015.08a
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• pp.160-160
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• 2015

InGaZnO (IGZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) are very promising due to their potential use in high performance display backplane [1]. However, the stability of IGZO TFTs under the various stresses has been issued for the practical IGZO applications [2]. Up to now, many researchers have studied to understand the sub-gap density of states (DOS) as the root cause of instability [3]. Nomura et al. reported that these deep defects are located in the surface layer of the IGZO channel [4]. Also, Kim et al. reported that the interfacial traps can be affected by different RF-power during RF magnetron sputtering process [5]. It is well known that these trap states can influence on the performances and stabilities of IGZO TFTs. Nevertheless, it has not been reported how these defect states are created during conventional RF magnetron sputtering. In general, during conventional RF magnetron sputtering process, negative oxygen ions (NOI) can be generated by electron attachment in oxygen atom near target surface and accelerated up to few hundreds eV by self-bias of RF magnetron sputter; the high energy bombardment of NOIs generates bulk defects in oxide thin films [6-10] and can change the defect states of IGZO thin film. In this study, we have confirmed that the NOIs accelerated by the self-bias were one of the dominant causes of instability in IGZO TFTs when the channel layer was deposited by conventional RF magnetron sputtering system. Finally, we will introduce our novel technology named as Magnetic Field Shielded Sputtering (MFSS) process [9-10] to eliminate the NOI bombardment effects and present how much to be improved the instability of IGZO TFTs by this new deposition method.

• Transactions of the KSME C: Technology and Education
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• v.1 no.1
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• pp.7-12
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• 2013

Tin oxide thin-films have been widely applied in various fields of high-technology industries due to their excellent physical and electric properties. Those applications are found in various sensors, heating elements of windshield windows, solar cells, flat panel displays as tranparent electrodes. In this study, we conducted an experiment for the deposition of $SnO_2$ on glass of 2nd Gen. size for the effective development of large-scale backplanes. As deposition temperatures or flow rates of the $SnCl_4$ as a precursor changed, the thickness of tin oxide thin-films, their sheet resistances, transmittances, and hazes varied considerably.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2013.02a
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• pp.470-470
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• 2013

Recently, active materials such as amorphous silicon (a-Si), poly crystalline silicon (poly-Si), transition metal oxide semiconductors (TMO), and organic semiconductors have been demonstrated for flexible electronics. In order to apply flexible devices on the polymer substrates, all layers should require the characteristic of flexibility as well as the low temperature process. Especially, pentacene thin film transistors (TFTs) have been investigated for probable use in low-cost, large-area, flexible electronic applications such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, smart cards, display backplane driver circuits, and sensors. Since pentacene TFTs were studied, their electrical characteristics with varying single variable such as strain, humidity, and temperature have been reported by various groups, which must preferentially be performed in the flexible electronics. For example, the channel mobility of pentacene organic TFTs mainly led to change in device performance under mechanical deformation. While some electrical characteristics like carrier mobility and concentration of organic TFTs were significantly changed at the different temperature. However, there is no study concerning multivariable. Devices actually worked in many different kinds of the environment such as thermal, light, mechanical bending, humidity and various gases. For commercialization, not fewer than two variables of mechanism analysis have to be investigated. Analyzing the phenomenon of shifted characteristics under the change of multivariable may be able to be the importance with developing improved dielectric and encapsulation layer materials. In this study, we have fabricated flexible pentacene TFTs on polymer substrates and observed electrical characteristics of pentacene TFTs exposed to tensile and compressive strains at the different values of temperature like room temperature (RT), 40, 50, $60^{\circ}C$. Effects of bending and heating on the device performance of pentacene TFT will be discussed in detail.

• 한국정보디스플레이학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2008.10a
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• pp.1199-1202
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• 2008

High mobility bottom gate thin film transistors (TFTs) with an amorphous gallium tin zinc oxide (a-GSZO) channel layer have been produced by rf magnetron cosputtering using a gallium zinc oxide (GZO) and tin (Sn) targets. The effect of the post annealing temperatures ($200^{\circ}C$, $250^{\circ}C$ and $300^{\circ}C$) was evaluated and compared with two series of TFTs produced at room temperature and $150^{\circ}C$ during the channel deposition. From the results it was observed that the effect of pos annealing is crucial for both series of TFTs either for stability as well as for improving the electrical characteristics. The a-GSZO TFTs operate in the enhancement mode (n-type), present a high saturation mobility of $24.6\;cm^2/Vs$, a subthreshold gate swing voltage of 0.38 V/decade, a turn-on voltage of -0.5 V, a threshold voltage of 4.6 V and an $I_{ON}/I_{OFF}$ ratio of $8{\times}10^7$, satisfying all the requirements to be used in active-matrix backplane.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Electromagnetic Engineering and Science
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.339-347
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• 2014

In this paper, the authors present a new design for a broad-band metamaterial(MTM) absorber that utilizes flexible substrate. The proposed MTM unit cell is constructed by a electric-inducive-capacitive(ELC) resonator and a cut-wire on the same side of the flexible polyimide substrate. To reduce the radar cross section at frequencies other than the targeted frequency bands, the metallic pattern layer of the proposed structure is placed facing toward the incident wave propagation direction. A prototype absorber was fabricated with a planar array of $33{\times}45$ unit cells. Our experiments showed that the proposed absorber exhibits a peak absorption rate of 92 % and 93 % at 9.06 GHz and 15.0 GHz, respectively, and 75 % of the full-width at half-maximum(FWHM) bandwidth is achieved. The proposed backplane-less MTM structure can be used for a broad-band microwave absorber and irregular surface applications.

• Journal of Information Display
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• v.10 no.1
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• pp.33-36
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• 2009

A new hybrid silicon thin-film transistor (TFT) fabrication process using the DPSS laser crystallization technique was developed in this study to realize low-temperature poly-Si (LTPS) and a-Si:H TFTs on the same substrate as a backplane of the active-matrix liquid crystal flat-panel display (AMLCD). LTPS TFTs were integrated into the peripheral area of the activematrix LCD panel for the gate driver circuit, and a-Si:H TFTs were used as a switching device of the pixel electrode in the active area. The technology was developed based on the current a-Si:H TFT fabrication process in the bottom-gate, back-channel etch-type configuration. The ion-doping and activation processes, which are required in the conventional LTPS technology, were thus not introduced, and the field effect mobility values of $4\sim5cm^2/V{\cdot}s$ and $0.5cm^2/V{\cdot}s$ for the LTPS and a-Si:H TFTs, respectively, were obtained. The application of this technology was demonstrated on the 14.1" WXGA+(1440$\times$900) AMLCD panel, and a smaller area, lower power consumption, higher reliability, and lower photosensitivity were realized in the gate driver circuit that was fabricated in this process compared with the a-Si:H TFT gate driver integration circuit

• JSTS:Journal of Semiconductor Technology and Science
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• v.15 no.5
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• pp.519-525
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• 2015

Positive bias stress-induced instability in amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) bottom-gate thin-film transistors (TFTs) was investigated under high $V_{GS}$/low $V_{DS}$ and low $V_{GS}$/high $V_{DS}$ stress conditions through incorporating a forward/reverse $V_{GS}$ sweep and a low/high $V_{DS}$ read-out conditions. Our results showed that the electron trapping into the gate insulator dominantly occurs when high $V_{GS}$/low $V_{DS}$ stress is applied. On the other hand, when low $V_{GS}$/high $V_{DS}$ stress is applied, it was found that holes are uniformly trapped into the etch stopper and electrons are locally trapped into the gate insulator simultaneously. During a recovery after the high $V_{GS}$/low $V_{DS}$ stress, the trapped electrons were detrapped from the gate insulator. In the case of recovery after the low $V_{GS}$/high $V_{DS}$ stress, it was observed that the electrons in the gate insulator diffuse to a direction toward the source electrode and the holes were detrapped to out of the etch stopper. Also, we found that the potential profile in the a-IGZO bottom-gate TFT becomes complicatedly modulated during the positive $V_{GS}/V_{DS}$ stress and the recovery causing various threshold voltages and subthreshold swings under various read-out conditions, and this modulation needs to be fully considered in the design of oxide TFT-based active matrix organic light emitting diode display backplane.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Telematics and Electronics C
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• v.36C no.12
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• pp.36-46
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• 1999

As the requirements of embedded systems increase, the design complexity of the system becomes higher. The formal design methodology is required which supports well-balanced specification for control and dataflow to design a complex system. In this paper, control modules and function modules are separately described with FSMs and dataflow graphs respectively, and integrated into a system specification via inter-model communications. In previous approaches, the system could not be verified until control modules and dataflow modules are combined at the final design stage. However our approach enables us to design each part as the proper model of computation at early stage, and to verify the compositions and to co-synthesize the system effectively in the same framework. Especially this paper focuses on the communication protocols between control and dataflow models. Preliminary experiments show practicality of the proposed technique.

• Journal of IKEEE
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.33-39
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• 2010

In this paper, a 5Gb/s receiver with an adaptive equalizer for serial link interfaces is proposed. For effective gain control, a least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm was implemented with two internal signals of slicers instead of output node of an equalizing filter. The scheme does not affect on a bandwidth of the equalizing filter. It also can be implemented without passive filter and it saves chip area and power consumption since two internal signals of slicers have a similar DC magnitude. The proposed adaptive equalizer can compensate up to 25dB and operate in various environments, which are 15m shield-twisted pair (STP) cable for DisplayPort and FR-4 traces for backplane. This work is implemented in $0.18-{\mu}m$ 1-poly 4-metal CMOS technology and occupies $200{\times}300{\mu}m^2$. Measurement results show only 6mW small power consumption and 2Gbps operating range with fabricated chip. The equalizer is expected to satisfy up to 5Gbps operating range if stable varactor(RF) is supported by foundry process.

• Proceedings of the Korean Vacuum Society Conference
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• 2014.02a
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• pp.278.1-278.1
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• 2014

Organic materials have been explored as the gate dielectric layers in thin film transistors (TFTs) of backplane devices for flexible display because of their inherent mechanical flexibility. However, those materials possess some disadvantages like low dielectric constant and thermal resistance, which might lead to high power consumption and instability. On the other hand, inorganic gate dielectrics show high dielectric constant despite their brittle property. In order to maintain advantages of both materials, it is essential to develop the alternative materials. In this work, we manufactured nanocomposite gate dielectrics composed of organic material and inorganic nanoparticle and integrated them into organic TFTs. For synthesis of nanocomposite gate dielectrics, polyimide (PI) was explored as the organic materials due to its superior thermal stability. Candidate nanoprticles (NPs) of halfnium oxide, titanium oxide and aluminium oxide were considered. In order to realize NP concentration dependent electrical characteristics, furthermore, we have synthesized the different types of nanocomposite gate dielectrics with varying ratio of each inorganic NPs. To analyze gate dielectric properties like the capacitance, metal-Insulator-metal (MIM) structures were prepared together with organic TFTs. The output and transfer characteristics of organic TFTs were monitored by using the semiconductor parameter analyzer (HP4145B), and capacitance and leakage current of MIM structures were measured by the LCR meter (B1500, Agilent). Effects of mechanical cyclic bending of 200,000 times and thermally heating at $400^{\circ}C$ for 1 hour were investigated to analyze mechanical and thermal stability of nanocomposite gate dielectrics. The results will be discussed in detail.