Development of Thermal Plasma Jet Induced Annealing Technology and Its Application to Electronic Device Fabrication

Atmospheric pressure micro-thermal-plasma-jet (mTPJ) irradiation on amorphous silicon (aSi) strips and its application to thin ˆlm transistor (TFT) fabrication have been investigated. Strip channel with the width smaller than 3 mm is eŠective to eliminate random grain boundaries by ˆltering eŠect. High speed scanning of mTPJ suppresses mass transfer of molten Si and generation of in grain defects. By introducing strip channel, high performance TFTs with a high average ˆeld eŠect mobility (mFE) of 503 cm2V-1s-1 (nchannel) are successfully fabricated with small device to device variation. CMOS shift register fabricated with strip channel TFTs was operated by 5V power supply at 50MHz. These results indicate that mTPJ crystallization of strip channel is quite promising for next generation TFT applications.