Low Temperature Polysilicon Technology: A low cost SOI technology?

Large Area Electronics (LAE) is becoming a major branch of the electronics industry with 1997 revenues exceeding $ 10b. It is supported by a large industrially-driven research and development effort mainly located in Far-East countries (Japan, Korea, Taiwan). Most of the LAE activity deals with displays along with solar cells or X-ray imagers, and, for all these applications, hydrogenated amorphous silicon (aSi-H) is the material of choice. For about twenty years, polysilicon (polySi) technology has been intensively developed in industrial or public research laboratories but the only successful technology to entre manufacture of large area electronics products was the aSi-H one (and at a much lower scale, the Cd-Se). However, polySi is becoming a challenger for aSi-H as the implementation of low-temperature processes now render this technology (LT-polySi) compatible with large area glass or plastic-type substrates.