Characteristics of Zinc Oxide Thin Film Transistors Fabricated by Location-Controlled Hydrothermal Method

Abstract

In this paper, high-performance Zinc oxide (ZnO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) with bottom-gate (BG) structure and artificially location-controlled lateral grain growth have been prepared by low-temperature hydrothermal method. As the proper design of source/drain structure of ZnO/Ti/Pt thin films, the lateral grain growth can be artificially controlled in the desired location and the vertical grain boundary perpendicular to the current flow in the channel region can be reduced to single one. As compared with the conventional sputtered ZnO BG-TFTs, the proposed location-controlled hydrothermal ZnO BG-TFTs (W/L = 250 mu m/10 mu m) demonstrated the higher field-effect mobility of 6.09 cm(2)/V.s, lower threshold voltage of 3.67 V, larger on/off current ratio above 10(6), and superior current drivability, which can be attributed to the high-quality ZnO thin films with the reduced vertical grain boundaries in the channel region.