Qinglong Li

Abstract

Low-temperature polysilicon (LTPS) has emerged as a dominant technology for high performance thin-film transistors (TFTs) used in mobile liquid crystal display (LCD) and organic light emitting diode (OLED) display products. As users demand higher quality in flat panel displays with a larger viewing area and finer resolution, the improvement in carrier mobility of LTPS compared to that of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) makes it an excellent candidate as a channel material for TFT. Advantages include improvements in switching speed and the ability to incorporate peripheral scan and data driver circuitry onto a low cost display substrate. Solid-phase crystallization (SPC) is a useful technique to realize polysilicon films due to its simplicity and low cost compared to excimer-laser annealing (ELA),which has many challenges in back-plane manufacturing on large glass panels.Metal induced crystallization (MIC) results in polycrystalline silicon films with grain size as large as tens of microns. Flash-lamp annealing (FLA) is a new and novel method to crystallize a-Si films at high temperature without distortion of the glass substrate by performing an annealing within millisecond range.This work investigates SPC, MIC and FLA techniques to realize LTPS films. In addition, TFTs were designed and fabricated to characterize the device quality of the semiconductor layer, and to compare the performance of different structural arrangements.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Thin film transistors--Materials; Thin film transistors--Design and construction; Crystallization; Annealing of crystals

Publication Date

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Department, Program, or Center

Microelectronic Engineering (KGCOE)

Advisor

Hirschman, Karl

Comments

Note: imported from RIT’s Digital Media Library running on DSpace to RIT Scholar Works in February 2014. Physical copy is available from RIT's Wallace Library at TK7871.96.T45 .L4 2013

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

MCEE-MS

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