Amorphous hafnium-indium-zinc oxide semiconductor thin film transistors

We developed amorphous hafnium-indium-zinc oxide (HIZO) thin films as oxide semiconductors and investigated the films electrically and physically. Adding of hafnium (Hf) element can suppress growing the columnar structure and drastically decrease the carrier concentration and hall mobility in HIZO films. The thin film transistors (TFTs) with amorphous HIZO active channel exhibit good electrical properties with field effect mobility of around 10 cm(2)/Vs, S of 0.23 V/decade, and high I-on/off ratio of over 10(8), enough to operate the next electronic devices. In particular, under bias-temperature stress test, the HIZO TFTs with 0.3 mol % (Hf content) showed only 0.46 V shift in threshold voltage, compared with 3.25 V shift in HIZO TFT (0.1 mol %). The Hf ions may play a key role to improve the instability of TFTs due to high oxygen bonding ability. Therefore, the amorphous HIZO semiconductor will be a prominent candidate as an operation device for large area electronic applications. (C) 2009 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3275801]