Device Physics of Contact Issues for the Overestimation and Underestimation of Carrier Mobility in Field-Effect Transistors

Very high values of carrier mobility have been recently reported in newly developed materials for field-effect transistors (FETs) or thin-film transistors (TFTs). However, there is an increasing concern of whether the values are overestimated. In this paper, we investigate how much contact resistance a FET or TFT can tolerate to allow the conventional current-voltage equations, which is derived for no contact resistance. We contend that mobility in transistors with resistive contact can be underestimated with the presence of the injection barrier, whereas mobility in transistors with gated Schottky contact can be overestimated by more than 10 times. The latter phenomenon occurs even in long-channel devices, and it becomes more severe when using low-k dielectrics. This is because the band bending and injection barrier experience a complicated evolution on account of electrostatic doping in the semiconducting layer; thus, they do not follow a capacitance approximation. When the band bending is weak, the accumulation is as weak as that in the subthreshold regime. Accordingly, the carrier concentration nonlinearly increases with the gate field. This mechanism can occur with or without exhibiting the "kink" feature in the transfer curves, which has been suggested as the signature of overestimation. For precision, carrier mobility should be presented against gate voltage and should be examined by other recommended extraction methods.