Electric field modified Arrhenius description of charge transport in amorphous oxide semiconductor thin film transistors

Abstract

While it is known that the charge-carrier mobility in amorphous metal oxide semiconductor thin film transistors (TFT) deviates from Arrhenius temperature dependence, we found that the Hall mobility measured in amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) follows an Arrhenius relation surprisingly well. We explain these observations by the effect of strong vertical electric field created by the gate voltage, which facilitates direct tunneling of trapped carriers into the conductive band and leads to virtually temperature independent mobility. We present a generalized Arrhenius model based on the effective temperature concept. We show that our model allows quantitative description of the temperature dependence of the mobility in a-IGZO TFTs over a broad temperature range.