Modelling and Performance Analysis of Zinc Oxide based Thin Film Transistor

Abstract: In this paper, thin film of Zinc oxide is considered to be the active layer for the TFT. There are many advantages of using ZnO material as in large band gap of 3.37eV and photo transparency due to which it is extensively used in optoelectronics. The technology of macroelectronics has been the trend over the past few years and many research works mainly have been directed towards this macroelectronic domain. In this work the wurtzite crystal structure is assumed and a bottom aluminium gate TFT is designed having a glass substrate on which a layer of silicon nitrate dielectric layer is deposited, followed by the uniform deposition of ZnO active thin layer. The fabrication process is simulated on Athena framework of Silvaco TCAD and the IV characteristics of the TFT is extracted using the atlas framework. Finally the TFT is modelled into simple circuit to check the feasibility of ZnO based TFT in integrated circuits.

Keywords: TFT, ZnO, RF Magnetron sputtering, Silvaco.