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 cm 2 V −1 s −1 , a desirable on-to-off current ratio of 1.9 × 10 4 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.