Impact of pre-annealing process on electrical properties and stability of indium zinc oxide thin-film transistors.

This paper examined the effects of no treatment versus plasma treatment, and femtosecond laser irradiation as pre-annealing processes on indium zinc oxide (IZO) films and annealing at high temperatures. The plasma pre-annealed multilayer stacked IZO TFTs showed better electrical properties with mobility enhancement from 2.45 to 7.81 cm/Vs, but exhibited diminished on-off current ratio (I/I). The IZO thin-film transistor (TFT) prepared with femtosecond laser pre-annealing with low pulse energy generation (power of 3 W at 700 nm wavelength) for 100 s has also exhibited significantly improved electrical performance, the saturation mobility increased to 4.91 cm/Vs, the I/I ratio was enhanced from 4.5 × 10 to 2.1 × 10, the threshold voltage improved from - 1.44 to - 0.25 V, and the subthreshold swing was reduced from 1.21 to 0.61 V/dec. In conclusion, IZO TFTs with improved performance can be prepared using a femtosecond laser pre-annealing process, which has great potential for fabricating low-cost, high-performance devices.