Room-temperature fabrication of flexible oxide TFTs by co-sputtering of IGZO and ITO

Abstract Amorphous oxide semiconductors, especially indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO), have been widely studied and obtained significant progress in flexible thin-film transistors (TFTs) due to the high carrier mobility and low deposition temperature. However, a further annealing step is generally required to activate electrical properties and improve the device performance, which limited their applications in flexible electronics. In this study, we achieved flexible TFTs and arrays using co-sputtered IGZO and indium tin oxide (ITO) as channels deposited at room temperature without post-annealing. It was found that better transistor switching properties could be effectively achieved by regulating the sputtering power of ITO in the co-sputtered deposition. The device performance is comparable to that of the conventional oxide TFTs with high annealing temperatures (⩾300 °C), exhibiting a high saturation mobility ( μ sat ) of 15.3 cm 2 V −1 s −1 , a small subthreshold swing ( SS ) of 0.21 V dec −1 , and a very high on–off ratio ( I on/off ) of 10 11 . In addition, a 12 × 12 flexible TFT array was achieved with uniform performance owing to the low-temperature processing advantage of this technique. The flexible TFTs exhibited robust mechanical flexibility with a minimum bending radius of 5 mm and bending cycles up to 1000. Furthermore, an inverter based on co-sputtered IGZO and ITO was demonstrated with the maximum gain of 22. All these achievements based on the proposed TFTs without post-annealing process are expected to promote the applications in advanced flexible displays and large-area integrated circuits.