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....
A discrete trap model is developed and employed for elucidation of thin-film transistor (TFT) device physics trends. An attractive feature of this model is that only two model parameters are required, the trap energy depth, E[subscript T], and the trap density, N[subscript T]. The most relevant trends occur when E[subscript...
The research presented herein focuses on electrical assessment of oxide thin films as insulators. The current density-electric field (J-E) characteristics of four insulators of dramatically different electrical quality are assessed in terms of their operative electronic conduction mechanisms. Conduction in the two high-quality insulators is dominated by Ohmic conduction and...
The focus of this thesis is the investigation of thin-film transistors (TFTs) based on amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) in two circuit applications. To date, circuits implemented with AOS-based TFTs have been primarily enhancement-enhancement inverters, ring oscillators based on these inverters operating at peak frequencies up to ~400 kHz, and two-transistor...
The atomic solid state energy (SSE) scale is introduced as a tool for inorganic materials design. The SSE scale is obtained by assessing an average electron affinity (EA) (for a cation) or an average ionization potential (IP) (for an anion) for each atom using data from compounds having that specific...
The research presented herein represents an effort to combine the ultra-smooth surface of an amorphous metal thin film (AMTF) with a solution-processed dielectric synthesized via prompt inorganic condensation (PIC). Analysis of dielectric film quality is carried out via electrical measurements of metal-insulator-metal (MIM) diodes. Anneals at 500 and 700 °C...
A class of inorganic thin-film transistor (TFT) semiconductor materials has emerged involving oxides composed of post-transitional cations with (n-1)d¹⁰ns⁰ (n≥4) electronic configurations. This thesis is devoted to the pursuit of topics involving the development of these materials for TFT applications: Deposition of zinc oxide and zinc tin oxide semiconductor
layers...
The primary focus of this thesis involves modeling and development of p-type thin-film transistors (p-TFTs), moving towards the realization of a filly transparent thin-film transistor (TTFT). The modeling portion of this thesis emphasizes the development of physics-based TFT models, specifically focusing on the elucidation of non-ideal current-voltage characteristic behavior. A...
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...
In this thesis steady-state (i.e. steady-state with respect to the applied voltage waveform) transient current-transient voltage [i(t)-v(t)], transient brightness-transient current [b(t)-i(t)], transient brightness-transient voltage [b(t)-v(t)], transient current [i(t)], transient brightness [b(t)], and detrapped charge analysis are introduced as novel organic light emitting device (OLED) characterization methods. These analysis methods involve...