Fluorination-mitigated high-current degradation of amorphous InGaZnO thin-film transistors

Abstract As growing applications demand higher driving currents of oxide semiconductor thin-film transistors (TFTs), severe instabilities and even hard breakdown under high-current stress (HCS) become critical challenges. In this work, the triggering voltage of HCS-induced self-heating (SH) degradation is defined in the output characteristics of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc oxide (a-IGZO) TFTs, and used to quantitatively evaluate the thermal generation process of channel donor defects. The fluorinated a-IGZO (a-IGZO:F) was adopted to effectively retard the triggering of the self-heating (SH) effect, and was supposed to originate from the less population of initial deep-state defects and a slower rate of thermal defect transition in a-IGZO:F. The proposed scheme noticeably enhances the high-current applications of oxide TFTs.