Hydrogenation is one of the effective methods for improving the performance of ZnO thin film transistors (TFTs), which originate from the fact that hydrogen (H) acts as a defect passivator and a shallow n-type dopant in ZnO materials. However, passivation accompanied by an excessive H doping of the channel region of a ZnO TFT is undesirable because high carrier density leads to negative threshold voltages. Herein, we report that Mg/H codoping could overcome the trade-off between performance and reliability in the ZnO TFTs. The theoretical calculation suggests that the incorporation of Mg in hydrogenated ZnO decrease the formation energy of interstitial H and increase formation energy of O-vacancy (VO). The experimental results demonstrate that the existence of the diluted Mg in hydrogenated ZnO TFTs could be sufficient to boost up mobility from 10 to 32.2 cm(2)/(V s) at a low carrier density (∼2.0 × 10(18) cm(-3)), which can be attributed to the decreased electron effective mass by surface band bending. The all results verified that the Mg/H codoping can significantly passivate the VO to improve device reliability and enhance mobility. Thus, this finding clearly points the way to realize high-performance metal oxide TFTs for low-cost, large-volume, flexible electronics.
Keywords: ZnO; hydrogenation; mobility; reliability; thin film transistors.