Integrating Poly-Silicon and InGaZnO Thin-Film Transistors for CMOS Inverters

The applications of a-InGaZnO thin-film transistors (TFTs) to logic circuits have been limited owing to the intrinsic n-channel operation. In this paper, we demonstrated a hybrid inverter constructed by p-channel low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) TFTs and n-channel amorphous-indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) TFTs. Hydrogenated LTPS TFTs and a-IGZO TFTs have been successfully fabricated on the same panel, followed by a rapid thermal annealing treatment to remove the hydrogens in the a-IGZO TFTs. The resulted hybrid inverter exhibits large noise margin closed to V-DD/2 and a high voltage gain as 68.3. Due to the complementary configurations in the static state, the inverter shows small current and thus consumes low power in hundreds of picowatts. As all the fabrication processes are compatible with conventional techniques, the reported results may open new opportunities in circuit design and applications for oxide TFTs.