The effect of metallization contact resistance on the measurement of the field effect mobility of long-channel unannealed amorphous In–Zn–O thin film transistors

Abstract The effect of contact resistance on the measurement of the field effect mobility of compositionally homogeneous channel indium zinc oxide (IZO)/IZO metallization thin film transistors (TFTs) is reported. The TFTs studied in this work operate in depletion mode as n-channel field effect devices with a field effect mobility calculated in the linear regime ( μ FE ) of 20 ± 1.9 cm 2 /Vs and similar of 18 ± 1.3 cm 2 /Vs when calculated in the saturation regime ( μ FE sat ). These values, however, significantly underestimate the channel mobility since a large part of the applied drain voltage is dropped across the source/drain contact interface. The transmission line method was employed to characterize the contact resistance and it was found that the conducting-IZO/semiconducting-IZO channel contact is highly resistive (specific contact resistance, ρ C  > 100 Ωcm 2 ) and, further, this contact resistance is modulated with applied gate voltage. Accounting for the contact resistance (which is large and modulated by gate voltage), the corrected μ FE is shown to be 39 ± 2.6 cm 2 /Vs which is consistent with Hall mobility measurements of high carrier density IZO.