Hydrogen plasma-enhanced crystallization of amorphous silicon for low-temperature polycrystalline silicon TFT's

It has recently been discovered that a room temperature hydrogen plasma could reduce the crystallization time at 600 °C of hydrogenated amorphous silicon films by a factor of five to a reasonable four hours [1]. Further, the process can be spatially controlled by masking with a patterned oxide. In this abstract, we report for the first time the successful application of this method to an all low-temperature (≤600 °C) TFT fabrication process. Good performance with mobility of 40-35 cm²/Vs and an ON/OFF ratio of 4×10⁵ has been achieved with a crystallization time of only four hours.