Polished TFT's: surface roughness reduction and its correlation to device performance improvement

Chemical-mechanical polishing (CMP) has been applied to the fabrication of n-channel polysilicon thin film transistors (poly-Si TFT's). Three different polishing conditions are compared: (1) polishing before; (2) polishing after; and (3) both polishing before and after the a-Si recrystallization. Devices with no polishing act as control samples. Experiments consistently reveal that devices with post-anneal polishing exhibit the best performance, Two-fold improvement of drain current is attributed to the smoother active polysilicon surface. The electrical characteristics of a post-anneal polished TFT in terms of field effect mobility /spl mu//sub FE/, threshold voltage V/sub T/, and subthreshold swing S can be further improved if hydrogenation is employed. It is also found that a large decrease in the poly-Si surface roughness leads to higher dielectric breakdown strength and improved short-channel effects. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) results are presented and correlated with electrical results.