Effect of Humidity on Properties of Aqueous-Processed Tb-Doped Indium Oxide Thin-Film Transistors

Abstract

Aqueous route is readily for fabricating oxide thin-film transistors (TFTs), but the relative humidity (RH) impacts evolution of oxide thin films. Herein, the effect of RH on the electronic performance and bias stability of aqueous-processed Tb-doped indium oxide (Tb:In2O3) TFTs is investigated. The mobility is sensitive to RH. By tuning the RH for desirable thickness and density of the obtained Tb:In2O3 films, the TFTs present optimized mobility of 13.0 cm2/Vs, with high ON/OFF ratio of 108. Notably, low threshold voltage shift of −0.35 V and 0.42 V under negative and positive gate bias stress are simultaneously obtained with a fabricating RH of 40%. Moreover, dry ambience (RH <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\le23$ </tex-math></inline-formula> %) affords to abundant nanopores and defects, resulting in inferior performance and stability of the aqueous-processed oxide TFTs. And high humid ambience easily ruins the uniform of precursor films. This work indicates the strategy to fabricate highly stable oxide TFTs with high performance.