We studied the performance improvement of hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin-film transistor (TFT) using atmospheric pressure chemical vapor deposition (APCVD) SiO2 as a gate insulator. The threshold voltage and the subthreshold swing decrease remarkably by N2 plasma treatment on the APCVD SiO2 surface even though the field effect mobility changes little, indicating that the interface state density around the Fermi level is reduced significantly by N2 plasma treatment. We obtained the high performance a-Si:H TFT with the field effect mobility of 1.25 cm2/V s, the threshold voltage of 3.5 V and the subthreshold swing of 0.45 V/dec.