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We demonstrated gate insulators (GI) fabricated by solution process with the aim of replacing traditional vacuum processed GI. We selected solution siloxane-based material due to its extremely high thermal resistance, excellent transparency, flexibility, and simple cost-effective fabrication. We made top gate TFT by depositing a siloxane gate insulator through spin-coating technique on a-IGZO. For comparison, we measured a conventional a-IGZO TFT using SiO2 as a GI for a reference. The TFTs with siloxane GI showed extremely high mobility (µ= 22±3 cm2·V-1·s-1), ultra-smooth interface (no hysteresis), and including other suitable electrical characteristics that are promising to enable the possibility to fabricate high performance all-solution processed devices in the future.

In a previous work, we reported the high field effect mobility of ZnO-doped In2O3 (IZO) thin film transistors (TFTs) irradiated by excimer laser annealing (ELA) [M. Fujii et al., Appl. Phys. Lett. 102, 122107 (2013)]. However, a deeper understanding of the effect of ELA on the IZO film characteristics based on crystallinity, carrier concentrations, and optical properties is needed to control localized carrier concentrations for fabricating self-aligned structures in the same oxide film and to adequately explain the physical characteristics. In the case of as-deposited IZO film used as the channel, a high carrier concentration due to a high density of oxygen vacancies was observed; such a film does not show the required TFT characteristics but can act as a conductive film. We achieved a decrease in the carrier concentration of IZO films by crystallization using ELA. This means that ELA can form localized conductive or semi-conductive areas on the IZO film. We confirmed that the reason for the carrier concentration decrease was the decrease of oxygen-deficient regions and film crystallization. The annealed IZO films showed nano-crystalline phase, and the temperature at the substrate was substantially less than the temperature limit for flexible films such as plastic, which is 50°C. This paves the way for the formation of self-aligned structures and separately formed conductive and semi-conductive regions in the same oxide film.