A Unified Degradation Model of a-InGaZnO TFTs Under Negative Gate Bias With or Without an Illumination

Abstract

Degradation behaviors of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) under negative bias stress (NBS) and negative bias illumination stress (NBIS) are investigated systematically. In some cases, a two-stage degradation behavior of a-IGZO TFTs is observed under both NBS and NBIS, which begins with a small positive shift of threshold voltage (V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sub> ), and is followed by a large negative V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sub> shift. There is an intrinsic correlation between the degradations of NBS and NBIS. Quantitatively, both stress gate biases (V <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">G</sub> ) and temperature dependencies of ΔV <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sub> of the two degradations are found to be the same and the recovery processes are also very similar. A unified model of NBS and NBIS is proposed to consistently explain the degradation behaviors of a-IGZO TFTs and their correlation.