Pulse Thermal Processing for Low Thermal Budget Integration of IGZO Thin Film Transistors

Pulse thermal processing (PTP) has been explored for low thermal budget integration of indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) thin film transistors (TFTs). The IGZO TFTs are exposed to a broadband (0.2-1.4 μm) arc lamp radiation spectrum with 100 pulses of 1 m pulse width. With power density of 3.95 kW/cm² and 0.1 s total irradiation time, the PTP treated IGZO TFTs showed comparable or improved switching and bias stability properties, at significantly lower thermal budget, to furnace annealed IGZO TFT. The typical field effect mobility μFE, threshold voltage VT, and sub-threshold gate swing S.S were calculated to be 7.8 cm₂/V·s, 8.1 V, and 0.22 V/decade, respectively. The observed performance shows promise for low thermal budget TFT integration on flexible substrates exploiting the large-area, scalable PTP technology.