The effect of deposition conditions and annealing on the performance of high-mobility GIZO TFTs

The influence of oxygen content, radio-frequency (rf) sputtering power, and postdeposition annealing on the electrical properties of gallium-indium-zinc oxide (GIZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) is analyzed. Little to no oxygen content in the sputtering chamber is crucial to obtain high-performance devices, even before annealing. In contrast, a high oxygen content and rf power lead, respectively, to unstable/poor performing and depletion mode TFTs before annealing, and mainly for these nonideal conditions, annealing proves to be effective to improve device performance/stability and to decrease the performance discrepancy among TFTs processed under different oxygen and rf power conditions. Best TFTs present a field-effect mobility of 46 cm(2)/V s, subthreshold swing of 0.26 V/dec, threshold voltage of 0.70 V, and an on/off ratio 10(8)-10(9). These results are a consequence of the optimized processing and of the usage of proper GIZO target composition, 1:2:1 mol. (C) 2008 The Electrochemical Society.