Thin-film transistors based on hot-wire amorphous silicon on silicon nitride

We present state-of-the-art thin-film transistors (TFTs) incorporating amorphous silicon i-layers deposited by hot-wire chemical vapor deposition. The TFTs are deposited on glow-discharge silicon nitride as well as on thermally-grown silicon dioxide. The devices on silicon nitride have a field-effect mobility above 0.7 cm(2)/Vs, a threshold voltage around 2 V and a subthreshold slope as low as 0.5 V/dec, As commonly observed, the TFTs on silicon-dioxide have higher values for the threshold voltage and the sub-threshold slope. In the annealed state the hot-wire TFTs show almost the same properties as TFTs deposited by conventional plasma-enhanced chemical vapor deposition. Nevertheless, the stress-time dependent behavior under prolonged gate-voltage stress at elevated temperature is different from that of the glow-discharge devices. The hot-wire TFTs are clearly more stable than their glow-discharge counterparts. Furthermore, we found differences in the stress behavior of the hot-wire TFTs deposited on silicon nitride and silicon dioxide.