Development of Thermal Plasma Jet Induced Annealing Technology and Its Application to Electronic Device Fabrication

Atmospheric pressure micro-thermal-plasma-jet (μ-TPJ) irradiation on amorphous silicon (a-Si) strips and its application to thin film transistor (TFT) fabrication have been investigated. Strip channel with the width smaller than 3 μm is effective to eliminate random grain boundaries by filtering effect. High speed scanning of μ-TPJ suppresses mass transfer of molten Si and generation of in-grain defects. By introducing strip channel, high performance TFTs with a high average field effect mobility (μFE) of 503 cm2V−1s−1 (n-channel) are successfully fabricated with small device to device variation. CMOS shift register fabricated with strip channel TFTs was operated by 5V power supply at 50MHz. These results indicate that μ-TPJ crystallization of strip channel is quite promising for next generation TFT applications.