Band alignment of InGaZnO4/Si interface by hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy

Although amorphous InGaZnO4 has intensively been studied for a semiconductor channel material of thin-film transistors in next-generation flat-panel displays, its electronic structure parameters have not been reported. In this work, the electron affinities (chi) and the ionization potentials (I-p) of crystalline and amorphous InGaZnO4 (c-IGZO and a-IGZO) were measured using bulk-sensitive hard x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. First, the chi and I-p values of c-IGZO and a-IGZO thin films were estimated by aligning the Zn 2p(3/2) core level energies to a literature value for ZnO, which provided chi = 3.90 eV and I-p = 7.58 eV for c-IGZO and 4.31 eV and 7.41 eV for a-IGZO. It was also confirmed that the escape depth of the photoelectrons excited by the photon energy of 5950.2 eV is 3.3 nm for a-IGZO and large enough for directly measuring the interface electronic structure using a-IGZO/c-Si heterojunctions. It provided the valence band offset of similar to 2.3 eV, which agrees well with the above data. The present results substantiate that the a-IGZO/c-Si interface follows well the Schottky-Mott rule. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4744983]