Formation of polycrystalline-Si thin-film transistors with tunneling field-effect-transistor structure

The formation of a poly-Si thin-film transistor (TFT) device with a tunneling field-effect-transistor (TFET) structure has been studied. With scaling the gate length down to 1 mu m, the poly-Si TFT device with a conventional metal-oxide-semiconductor-field-effect-transistor structure would be considerably degraded, which exhibits an off-state leakage of about 10 nA/mu m at a drain bias of 6 V. The short channel effect would tend to cause the source/drain punch-through and also increase the lateral electric field within the channel region, thus enhancing the carried field emission via trap states. The TFET structure can be employed to alleviate the short channel effect in the poly-Si TFT device. As a result, even for a gate length of 1 mu m, the poly-Si TFT device with the TFET structure can exhibit an off-state leakage smaller than 1 pA/mu m and an on/off current ratio of about eight orders at a drain bias of 7 V. Furthermore, even for a gate length of only 0.2 mu m, the resultant poly-Si TFT device with the TFET structure can exhibit good electrical characteristics with an off-state leakage smaller than 10 pA/mu m and an on/off current ratio of about six orders at a drain bias of 3.2 V. As a result, this scheme is promising for implementing a high packing density of poly-Si TFT devices. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.