The central focus of this thesis is the design, fabrication and characterization of amorphous oxide semiconductor (AOS) thin-film transistor (TFT) current mirrors. The thin-film deposition and circuit fabrication methods used to realize zinc tin oxide (ZTO) TFT
current mirrors are addressed in order to elucidate the processing challenges for this...
This thesis focuses on two aspects of transparent electronics, SnO₂ transparent thin-film transistors (TTFTs) and transparent circuits. Both depletion- and enhancement-mode SnO₂ TTFTs are realized. The maximum effective mobility for the depletion- and enhancement-mode devices are 2 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹ and 0.8 cm²V⁻¹s⁻¹, respectively. A variety of techniques to decrease the carrier...
Amorphous metal thin films (AMTFs) are of potential use for metal-insulator-metal (MIM) tunnel diode applications due to their ultra-smooth surfaces, a consequence of their amorphous microstructure. The objective of this thesis is to design a thermally-stable AMTF capable of maintaining MIM tunnel diode performance after a post-deposition anneal in excess...
An analytical expression is derived which allows the
bulk minority carrier recombination lifetime, t, and the
surface recombination velocity, S, to be extracted from a
single noncontact photoconductivity decay (PCD) measurement. This analytical expression is rather complex, but
can be reduced to a first order approximation. The first
order approximation...
The achievements of this thesis are the development of several models for the SPICE (Simulation Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis) simulation of alternating-current thin-film electroluminescent (ACTFEL) devices, organic light-emitting devices (OLEDs), and polymer light-emitting devices (PLEDs). First, an ACTFEL model based on the built-in HSPICE Fowler-Nordheim tunneling diode is developed,...
A class of high-performance thin-film transistor (TFT) channel materials has emerged
involving oxides composed of heavy-metal cations (HMCs) with (n-1)d¹⁰ns⁰ (n≥4)
electronic configurations. This thesis is devoted to the pursuit of three topics involving
the development of these materials for TFT applications: modeling TFT currentvoltage
characteristics, an exploratory method for...
Current leading thin-film solar cell technologies, i.e., cadmium telluride (CdTe) and copper indium gallium diselenide (CIGS), employ elements which are either toxic (Cd), or rare and/or expensive (In, Te, Ga, and Cd). The aim of this thesis is to investigate new, abundant, non-toxic p-type semiconductors for potential solar absorber application....