APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS 93, 063501 共2008兲

High field-effect mobility amorphous InGaZnO transistors

with aluminum electrodes
Jong H. Na,a兲 M. Kitamura, and Y. Arakawa
Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku,
Tokyo 153-8904, Japan and Japan and Institute for Nano Quantum Information Electronics,
University of Tokyo, 4-6-1 Komaba, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 153-8904, Japan
共Received 2 July 2008; accepted 23 July 2008; published online 11 August 2008兲
We report on the device characteristics of amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors
共TFTs兲 with aluminum 共Al兲 electrodes. The TFTs exhibited a high performance with a field-effect
mobility of 11.39 cm2 / V s, a subthreshold swing of 181 mV/ decade, and an on-off ratio of 107.
Further improvement in device performance was achieved by doping the source/drain contact
regions, resulting in an enhanced mobility of 16.6 cm2 / V s at an operating voltage as low as 5 V.
© 2008 American Institute of Physics. 关DOI: 10.1063/1.2969780兴

Thin-film transistors 共TFTs兲 that can be prepared at low
temperatures have attracted much attention due to the great
potential for flexible electronics. One of the mainstreams in
this field is the use of organic semiconductors such as
pentacene1 and fullerene C60.2 However, device performance
of the organic TFTs is still limited by low field-effect mobil-
ity or rapidly degraded after exposing to air in many cases
共especially in n-type semiconductors兲. Another approach is
the use of functional oxide semiconductors such as zinc ox-
ide 共ZnO兲. Such oxide TFTs have an efficient electron con-
duction better than n-type organic TFTs. Recently, Nomura
et al. and Yabuta et al. demonstrated high performance amor-
phous In–Ga–Zn oxide 共a-IGZO兲 TFTs fabricated by pulsed
laser deposition3 and rf sputtering.4 The a-IGZO has a carrier
mobility ⬃10 cm2 / V s and can control carrier concentration
even in the amorphous phase. The mobility value is much
higher than those of organic materials or other amorphous
oxide semiconductors. The high mobility is attributed to the
result of the overlap of spherical s-orbital of the heavy post-
transition metal cations. More recently, Jeong et al.5 demon-
strated higher mobility a-IGZO TFTs with large area unifor-
mity for active matrix back plane, which represents a
promising application of the TFTs for driving next genera-
tion display devices.
An important issue to be considered for realizing im-
proved performance is the influence of source/drain S/D
electrodes, including materials, contact quality, and parasitic
resistance. So far, indium tin oxide 共ITO兲,3 Au,4 indium zinc
oxide 共IZO兲,6 MoW,7 and Pt/Ti 共Ref. 8兲 were used as S/D
electrodes for a-IGZO TFTs. The ITO and IZO electrodes
allow fully transparent TFTs, but large electron affinity of the
oxide electrodes 共and Au兲 causes nonlinear behaviors in the
linear regime of output characteristics due to the formation
of Schottky-like barrier between the electrodes and the
a-IGZO films. The Ohmic contact properties can be im-
proved by replacing electrode materials and/or by modifying
contact area. In general, heavily doped regions below S/D
electrodes are adopted to obtain good contact properties. An
attempt to dope the selected contact regions of a-IGZO films
by Ar plasma treatment have proven significant improvement
in device performance.8 However, this doping process possi-
a兲
Electronic mail: pions@iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp.
bly damages the film surface by sputtering ion 共Ar+兲 bom-
bardment.
In this work, we fabricated high field-effect mobility
a-IGZO TFTs with a high dielectric constant gate insulator
共high-k兲 titanium silicon oxide 共TiSiO2兲 and Al S/D elec-
trodes. The TiSiO2 and a-IGZO films were deposited by rf
sputtering at room temperature. The device exhibited a high
field-effect mobility of 11.39 cm2 / V s at 5 V. Since the car-
rier concentration of the a-IGZO films can be controlled by
varying O2 / Ar ratio during deposition, the mobility was im-
proved further by introducing doped layers between the
a-IGZO film and Al electrodes.
The top-contact a-IGZO TFTs were prepared on heavily
doped n-type silicon substrates with a shadow mask process.
A high capacitance gate insulator is required to induce a
large charge density at relatively low voltages. We have sug-
gested a promising high-k material titanium silicon oxide
共TiSiO2兲, covered with SiO2 layer, as a gate insulator for
low-voltage-operating TFTs.9 Here, we employ a triple layer
dielectric structure SiO2 / TiSiO2 / SiO2. Although the addi-
tional bottom oxide layer decreases effective gate capaci-
tance, the structure reduces the leakage current density
further by one order of magnitude in comparison to
TiSiO2 / SiO2 double layer structure. A 132-nm-thick TiSiO2
film sandwiched between thin SiO2 layers was deposited by
rf sputtering. The high-k gate insulator allows the TFTs to
operate at relatively low voltage range 共ⱕ5 V兲 compared to
SiO2共ⱕ30 V兲 and Y2O3共ⱕ6 V兲 gate insulators used in
literatures.3,7 Capacitance-voltage 共C − V兲 measurements per-
formed at room temperature resulted in an effective capaci-
tance of 76 nF/ cm2 at 1 kHz. The details concerning the
high-k TiSiO2 films can be found in our previous report.9
Subsequently, 50-nm-thick IGZO channel layers 共IGZO tar-
get; In: Ga: Zn= 1 : 1 : 1 in atomic ratio兲 were deposited. We
sputtered the channel layers at low input rf power 共50 W兲 to
minimize potential damage of deposited IGZO film. The
deposition rate of the films was ⬃10 nm/ min. It is well
known that the resistivity 共i.e., carrier concentration兲 of
a-IGZO films is controlled by Ar/O2 mixing ratio. Here, the
Ar flow rate was fixed at 12 SCCM 共SCCM denotes cubic
centimeter per minute at STP兲 and O2 flow rate was finely
varied from 0 to 0.3 SCCM. Figure 1共a兲 shows the depen-
dence of electrical resistivity for sputtered a-IGZO films on

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 063501-2 Na, Kitamura, and Arakawa
FIG. 1. 共Color online兲 共a兲 Dependence of electrical resistivity of rf sputtered
a-IGZO films on O2 / 共Ar+ O2兲 ratio, showing an abrupt transition. 共b兲 Sche-
matic illustration and micrograph of the a-IGZO TFT with doped region
共red layers兲 between the Al electrodes and a-IGZO channel layer.
the O2 / 共O2 + Ar兲 ratio. The variation of resistivity shows an
abrupt transition from 0.046 to 4.8⫻ 103 ⍀ cm. The resistiv-
ity of the a-IGZO films that are deposited with the gas mix-
ing ratio ⬎1.47% are out of the measurement limit, indicat-
ing that the deposited films possess semi-insulating
properties. In general, high resistivity films were used to
achieve low off-current and high on-off ratio. We used the
a-IGZO film with a resistivity of 4.8⫻ 103 ⍀ cm for device
fabrication because of difficulties in controlling electrical
characteristics for the TFTs with higher and lower resistivity
channel layers. In the case of low resistivity films, the TFTs
did not exhibit gate-controlled behaviors in transfer charac-
teristics, possibly due to the flow of conduction electrons
between the S/D electrodes even at zero gate bias. On the
other hand, high resistivity films lead to a significant de-
crease in drain current and difficulty in making Ohmic con-
tact with S/D electrodes. Finally, 60-nm-thick Al S/D elec-
trodes were formed by an electron-beam evaporator with a
deposition rate of 3 Å / s. Here, two different types of S/D
contacts were studied: For sample A, the Al S/D electrodes
were deposited directly on the a-IGZO film; for sample B,
prior to the Al deposition, a 10-nm-thick a-IGZO film with-
out O2 flow was deposited, introducing doped regions 共car-
rier concentration: ⬃1.6⫻ 1018 / cm3兲 between the S/D elec-
trodes and channel layer. The TFTs have a dimension of
channel length 共L兲 = 100 ␮m and width 共W兲 = 1000 ␮m.
Schematic structure of the fabricated device with doped lay-
ers 共sample B兲 is shown in Fig. 1共b兲.
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Appl. Phys. Lett. 93, 063501 共2008兲
FIG. 2. 共Color online兲 共a兲 Output characteristics at various VG for sample A,
showing good current saturation behaviors at high VD. 共b兲 Semilogarithmic
plot of ID-vs-VG 共red circles兲 and leakage current through the gate insulator
共blue circles兲 at VD = 0.1 and 5 V. 共c兲 The square root of ID-vs-VG at
VD = 5 V, indicating VT = 1.18 V and ␮sat = 11.39 cm2 / V s.
The electrical characteristics of the a-IGZO TFTs were
measured at room temperature using Keithley 4200 semicon-
ductor parameter analyzer. Figure 2共a兲 shows output charac-
teristics 关drain current 共ID兲-versus-drain voltage 共VD兲兴 of
a-IGZO TFTs for sample A, showing good current saturation
behaviors at high VD and no nonlinear characteristics of ID at
low VD. Transfer characteristics 关ID-versus-gate voltage
共VG兲兴 at VD = 0.1 共linear regime兲 and 5 V 共saturation regime兲
are given in Fig. 2共b兲. All transistors studied here have low
leakage currents ⬍240 pA. The TFT exhibits a good sub-
threshold swing 共S兲 of 181 mV/decade and a high on-off
ratio of 107. The device parameters including field-effect mo-
bility in saturation 共␮sat兲, linear regime 共␮lin兲, and threshold
voltage 共VT兲 were extracted from the transfer curves. The
square root of ID as a function of VG at VD = 5 V is almost
linear, as shown in Fig. 2共c兲. By fitting a straight line to the
 063501-3 Na, Kitamura, and Arakawa
FIG. 3. 共Color online兲 共a兲 Output characteristics at various VG for sample B.
共b兲 Semilogarithmic plot of ID-vs-VG 共red circles兲 and leakage current 共blue
circles兲 at VD = 0.1 and 5 V. 共c兲 The square root of ID -vs-VG at VD = 5 V,
indicating VT = 0.9 V and ␮sat = 16.6 cm2 / V s.
plot, we obtained ␮sat of 11.39 cm2 / V s and VT of
⬃1.18 V. The ␮sat obtained are comparable to those of high
mobility a-IGZO TFTs reported so far. We also obtained the
␮lin of 12.1 cm2 / V s. These two values obtained are nearly
comparable, implying that the field-effect mobility is inde-
pendent on VD.
As described earlier, different from the a-Si and crystal-
line semiconductors for which substitutional doping is effec-
tive, an effective doping of ionic amorphous oxides semicon-
ductors is achieved by controlling oxygen pressure during
deposition or implantation of cations with a low electron
affinity.10 Therefore, an appropriate doping of the S/D con-
tact region can be achieved simply by adding an a-IGZO
layer that are deposited with O2 / Ar ratio= 0. Figures 3共a兲
and 3共b兲 show output and transfer characteristics of sample
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Appl. Phys. Lett. 93, 063501 共2008兲
B. The output characteristics also exhibit a good Ohmic con-
tact property and current saturation behaviors. Furthermore,
the amount of ID is increased remarkably under same bias
condition compared to that of sample A. The square root of
ID versus VG plot given in Fig. 3共c兲 indicates an improved
mobility of ␮sat = 16.6 cm2 / V s and VT = 0.9 V. The promi-
nent increase in ID can be understood in the same manner as
conventional metal-oxide-semiconductor transistor struc-
tures, which is attributed to the reduction of parasitic contact
resistance between the electrode and channel layer.11 The
TFT on-resistance 共Ron兲, defined as the sum of the intrinsic
channel resistance 共Rch兲 and parasitic contact resistance 共R p兲,
is given by
Ron = 冏 冏
⳵ VD
⳵ ID
VG
VD→0
= Rch + R p . 共1兲
From the linear regions of the output curves given in Figs.
2共a兲 and 3共a兲 at VG = 5 V, we obtained Ron = 32.5 and
22.7 k⍀ for samples A and B, respectively. Assuming that
the Rch of these two TFTs is identical, the difference can be
regarded as difference of R p between the samples. Since the
channel dimension used here is defined by a shadow mask,
further reduction in channel dimensions using conventional
photolithograph and lift-off process is required to study the
details of parasitic resistance effects. However, the device
structure with Al electrodes is highly advantageous for im-
proving device performance of a-IGZO TFTs.
In conclusion, low-voltage-operating high perform-
ance a-IGZO TFTs are fabricated. The TFTs show high
linear and saturation mobility of ⬃11.39 cm2 / V s, S
= 181 mV/ decade, and on-off ratio ⬃107 at an operating
voltage of 5 V. The field-effect mobility is improved
remarkably by introducing a doped contact layer between
the electrode and channel layer. The improved mobility
⬃16.6 cm2 / V s is higher than those of a-IGZO TFTs oper-
ating in the voltage range reported so far.6,12
This work was supported by the Special Coordination
Funds for Promoting Science and Technology. One of the
authors 共J.H.N.兲 thanks the support of the JSPS fellowship
共ID No. P06110兲.
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