Cyclical Annealing Technique To Enhance Reliability of Amorphous Metal Oxide Thin Film Transistors

Hong-Chih Chen; Ting-Chang Chang; Wei-Chih Lai; Guan-Fu Chen; Bo-Wei Chen; Yu-Ju Hung; Kuo-Jui Chang; Kai-Chung Cheng; Chen-Shuo Huang; Kuo-Kuang Chen; Hsueh-Hsing Lu; Yu-Hsin Lin

doi:10.1021/acsami.7b16307

Cyclical Annealing Technique To Enhance Reliability of Amorphous Metal Oxide Thin Film Transistors

ACS Appl Mater Interfaces. 2018 Aug 8;10(31):25866-25870. doi: 10.1021/acsami.7b16307. Epub 2018 Feb 26.

Affiliations

¹ Department of Photonics , National Cheng Kung University , Tainan 701 , Taiwan R. O. C.
² New Display Process Research Division , AU Optronics Corporation , Hsinchu 300 , Taiwan R. O. C.

PMID: 29481039
DOI: 10.1021/acsami.7b16307

Abstract

This study introduces a cyclical annealing technique that enhances the reliability of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) via-type structure thin film transistors (TFTs). By utilizing this treatment, negative gate-bias illumination stress (NBIS)-induced instabilities can be effectively alleviated. The cyclical annealing provides several cooling steps, which are exothermic processes that can form stronger ionic bonds. An additional advantage is that the total annealing time is much shorter than when using conventional long-term annealing. With the use of cyclical annealing, the reliability of the a-IGZO can be effectively optimized, and the shorter process time can increase fabrication efficiency.

Keywords: X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS); anneal; indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO); metal oxide; negative bias illumination stress (NBIS); oxygen vacancies (Vo); reliability; thin film transistors (TFTs).