Area and Energy Efficient High-Performance ZnO Wavy Channel Thin-Film Transistor

Increased output current while maintaining low power consumption in thin-film transistors (TFTs) is essential for future generation large-area high-resolution displays. Here, we show wavy channel (WC) architecture in TFT that allows the expansion of the transistor width in the direction perpendicular to the substrate through integrating continuous fin features on the underlying substrate. This architecture enables expanding the TFT width without consuming any additional chip area, thus enabling increased performance while maintaining the real estate integrity. The experimental WCTFTs show a linear increase in output current as a function of number of fins per device resulting in 3.5× increase in output current when compared with planar counterparts that consume the same chip area. The new architecture also allows tuning the threshold voltage as a function of the number of fin features included in the device, as threshold voltage linearly decreased from 6.8 V for planar device to 2.6 V for WC devices with 32 fins. This makes the new architecture more power efficient as lower operation voltages could be used for WC devices compared with planar counterparts. It was also found that field effect mobility linearly increases with the number of fins included in the device, showing almost 1.8× enhancements in the field effect mobility than that of the planar counterparts. This can be attributed to higher electric field in the channel due to the fin architecture and threshold voltage shift.