Effect of plasma oxidation on tin-oxide active layer for thin-film transistor applications.

In this study, the plasma oxidation effect in tin-oxide (SnO_x) thin film was investigated. And on this basis, we fabricated n-type thin-film transistors (TFTs) using the SnO_x thin film with the plasma oxidation by experiments. By adjusting the processing time of the oxygen plasma treatment (OPT), the optimized SnO_x TFT device exhibited an extremely high field-effect mobility of 87.6 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹, a desirable on-to-off current ratio of 1.9 × 10⁴ and a threshold voltage of − 0.9 V. Furthermore, we investigated the origin of the performance enhancements in the n-type SnO_x TFTs with the optimized OPT by introducing the density of states (DOS) modeling in TCAD simulation. The numerical simulation indicated that the attributes of donor-like Gaussian defect states (oxygen vacancies) were modified in overall DOS due to the plasma oxidation effect. These present results show that the SnO_x TFT treated by oxygen plasma has great promise in the future high-performance flat panel display industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]