Investigation on the negative bias illumination stress-induced instability of amorphous indium-tin-zinc-oxide thin film transistors

The quantitative analysis of mechanism on negative bias illumination stress (NBIS)-induced instability of amorphous indium-tin-zinc-oxide thin-film transistor (TFT) was suggested along with the effect of equivalent oxide thickness (EOT) of gate insulator. The analysis was implemented through combining the experimentally extracted density of subgap states and the device simulation. During NBIS, it was observed that the thicker EOT causes increase in both the shift of threshold voltage and the variation of subthreshold swing as well as the hump-like feature in a transfer curve. We found that the EOT-dependence of NBIS instability can be clearly explicated with the donor creation model, in which a larger amount of valence band tail states is transformed into either the ionized oxygen vacancy VO2+ or peroxide O22− with the increase of EOT. It was also found that the VO2+-related extrinsic factor accounts for 80%–92% of the total donor creation taking place in the valence band tail states while the rest is taken by the O22– related intrinsic factor. The ratio of extrinsic factor compared to the total donor creation also increased with the increase of EOT, which could be explained by more prominent oxygen deficiency. The key founding of our work certainly represents that the established model should be considered very effective for analyzing the instability of the post-indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (IGZO) ZnO-based compound semiconductor TFTs with the mobility, which is much higher than those of a-IGZO TFTs.