Electrical Performance Enhancement and Low-Frequency Noise Estimation of In2O3-Based Thin Film Transistor Based on Doping Engineering

Abstract

In this work, solution-derived InErO thin films were deposited to act as the channel layers of thin film transistors (TFTs). The effect of Er doping content on the morphology, oxygen defects, optical properties of indium oxide (In2O3) films, and electrical performance of InErO/Al2O3 TFTs was systematically investigated. Based on experimental results, it can be inferred that InErO-TFTs with 5% Er doping content has demonstrated improved electrical performance, including field effect mobility ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu _{\text {FE}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> ) of 17.55 cm <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{{2}}\,\,\cdot \,\,\text{V}^{-{1}}\,\,\cdot \,\,\text{s}^{-{1}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${I} _{\text{ON}}/{I} _{\text{OFF}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.70\times 10^{{7}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , a subthreshold swing (SS) of 0.16 V/dec and threshold voltage shift of 0.10 and 0.09 V under positive bias stress (PBS) and negative bias stress (NBS) for 1800 s, respectively. The illumination NBS (NBIS) measurements have indicated the degraded device stability by reducing the light wavelength, which can be due to the ionization of oxygen vacancies. Low-frequency noise (LFN) characterizations on devices have shown that the interfacial density of states of In2O3-based TFTs decreases after Er doping. To demonstrate the potential applications of InErO-TFTs in logic circuits, a resistor-loaded unipolar inverter based on InErO/Al2O3 has been integrated, demonstrating good dynamic response behavior and high gain of 10. These results have indicated the great potential of solution-driven InErO-based TFTs for future applications in low-cost and high-performance electronics.