Impacts of O₂ Plasma on Negative Gate Bias Stress Instability of Tunnel Thin-Film Transistor

In this work, the impacts of oxygen (O2) plasma treatment on the performance and negative bias temperature instability (NBTI) of tunnel thin-film transistors (T-TFTs) with polycrystalline-silicon channel material are studied. After O2 plasma treatment, the T-TFT exhibits that the minimum leakage current is suppressed from 134 to 7 pA and the subthreshold swing (SS) is decreased from 0.602 to 0.508 V/decade. In addition, the degradation of SS and threshold voltage (VTH) of T-TFT with O2 plasma after NBTI stress for 1000 s are suppressed from 0.779 to 0.319 V/decade and 1.28 to -0.82 V, respectively. The degradation of on-state current is also improved significantly from -87% to -40% when the T-TFT is passivated by the O2 plasma. Moreover, the T-TFT with O2 plasma exhibits less stress voltage-dependent electrical degradation of NBTI than it without O2 plasma. When the stress voltage of NBTI increases, two-step VTH shift behavior of T-TFT with O2 plasma is observed due to the competition of hole trapping effect and SS degradation effect. Furthermore, the T-TFT with O2 plasma shows less electrical degradation quantity than it without O2 plasma when the temperature of NBTI is increased from 25 °C to 75 °C.