The effect of active-layer thickness on the characteristic of nanocrystalline silicon thin film transistor

Abstract

AbstractWe fabricated nc-Si TFTs in order to investigate the effect of the active-layer thickness on the characteristic of the nc-Si TFT. Bottom gate nc-Si TFTs were fabricated at 350°C using ICP-CVD. The thicknesses of the nc-Si layer were remained to 700, 1200 and 1700 Å. As the active-layer thickness increases, the mobility and the on-current level were not altered. However, the off-current level increased considerably and on/off ratio decreased. It may be attributed to highly doped characteristic of thick nc-Si film. As the nc-Si film thicker, the conductivity increases considerably and the Fermi level approaches to the conduction band minimum, which indicates the increases of doping level. The oxygen concentration shows high level of unintentional doping. Also, columnar growth of nc-Si film makes that the crystallinity of top region is much higher than that of bottom region. So, the conductivity of thick nc-Si film becomes high compared to that of thin nc-Si film. The structure of the nc-Si TFT with thick nc-Si film can be similar to the serial connection of N+, N- and N+ resistance, so that it suffers difficulty to suppress the off current and to secure high on/off ratio. Therefore, the off current can be suppressed by thinning of the high conducting active nc-Si layer and nc-Si TFT with channel thickness of 700 Å shows good on/off characteristic. It is deduced that bottom gate nc-Si TFT is necessary to have intrinsic channel layer as well as thin channel layer to reduce the leakage current.