Title:
Progress of pulsed laser annealing technology for solid-phase crystallization of Si film on glass

Speaker:
Susumu Horita
School of Materials Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

Abstract:
Poly- or microcrystalline silicon (poly-Si) films fabricated at low temperatures are of great interest for electron devices on temperature-sensitive and cheap substrates. The appropriate applications are thin-film transistor (TFT) in an active matrix flat panel display, solar cells, and so on because of higher reliability and higher mobility of poly-Si. Also, low-temperature fabrication technique can address current environmental issues caused by power or energy consumption. For future application, industry requires shorter annealing time, lower annealing temperature, more uniform electrical property such as mobility and threshold voltage in a whole substrate, and so on. For meeting these requirements, we have been investing solid-phase crystallization of Si film on glass by using pulsed laser annealing(PLA) with crystallization-induction (CI) layer of yttria-stabilized zirconia [(ZrO2)1-x(Y2O3)x : YSZ]. PLA method can crystallize Si films at effective low temperature near room one because of its short pulse duration time less than 10 ns. The YSZ CI layer can transfer its crystalline information to crystallized Si on glass so that we can obtain higher and more uniform crystalline quality of Si films. In this symposium, our previous and current research results on them are presented, including new two-step method in PLA for much improving film quality and characteristics of Si TFTs fabricated by the above technique.