Application of excimer-laser annealing to amorphous, poly-crystal and single-crystal silicon thin-film transistors

An excimer-laser annealing method has been reviewed as a powerful fabrication technology for various kinds of high-performance thin-film transistors (TFTs) on glass. The method was confirmed very attractive, for the short-channel a-Si TFT, to form selectively the highly-conductive source and drain in a self-aligned manner. A non-stoichiometric SiC0.2 film was crystallized uniformly due to extremely non-isothermal melt-regrowth kinetics, and was applied to the poly-Si based hetero-TFT. This TFT had a low off-current even under strong illumination conditions. Various modifications have been done for enlarging the grain size to more than the TFT feature size. Combination of these modifications enables the single-crystal Si TFT to enter into a practical developmental stage.