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(2)/Vs, but exhibited diminished on–off current ratio (I(on)/I(off)). 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(2)/Vs, the I(on)/I(off) ratio was enhanced from 4.5 × 10(5) to 2.1 × 10(6), 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.