Ar plasma treated ZnON transistor for future thin film electronics

To achieve high-mobility and high-reliability oxide thin film transistors (TFTs), ZnON has been investigated following an anion control strategy based on the substitution of oxygen with nitrogen in ZnO. However, as nitrogen possesses, compared to oxygen, a low reactivity with Zn, the chemical composition of ZnON changes easily, causing in turn a degradation of both the performance and the stability. Here, we have solved the issues of long-time stability and composition non-uniformity while maintaining a high channel mobility by adopting the argon plasma process, which can delay the reaction of oxygen with Zn–O–N; as a result, owing to the formation of very fine nano-crystalline structure in stable glassy phase without changes in the chemical composition, the material properties and stability under e-radiation have significantly improved. In particular, the channel mobility of the ZnON TFTs extracted from the pulsed I−V method was measured to be 138 cm2/V s.