Atmospheric pressure plasma processing and layer transfer technique for thin-film device fabrication on glass and plastic substrates

Crystalline growth from melt during micro-thermal-plasma-jet (μ-TPJ) irradiation to amorphous silicon (a-Si) film has been directly observed by high-speed camera. Long lateral growth perpendicular to the oval-shaped liquid-solid interface results in formation of random grain boundaries (GBs). Introduction of strip pattern markedly reduces random GBs and enables single-crystalline growth at predetermined channel regions. N-and p-channel thin-film transistors (TFTs) showed high performance and small characteristic variability, and operation of 8-bit shift register at a supply voltage of 5 V with the clock frequency of 50 MHz has been achieved. In addition, we propose a local layer transfer technique utilizing meniscus force of water, which enables formation of single-crystalline silicon (100) layer on glass and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates. High mobility TFTs of 1226 and 609 cm² V^-1 s^-1 respectively, have been successfully fabricated on each substrate.