Effect of plasma oxidation on tin-oxide active layer for thin-film transistor applications

In this study, the plasma oxidation effect in tin-oxide (SnOx) thin film was investigated. And on this basis, we fabricated n-type thin-film transistors (TFTs) using the SnOx thin film with the plasma oxidation by experiments. By adjusting the processing time of the oxygen plasma treatment (OPT), the optimized SnOx TFT device exhibited an extremely high field-effect mobility of 87.6 cm2 V−1 s−1, a desirable on-to-off current ratio of 1.9 × 104 and a threshold voltage of − 0.9 V. Furthermore, we investigated the origin of the performance enhancements in the n-type SnOx 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 SnOx TFT treated by oxygen plasma has great promise in the future high-performance flat panel display industries.