Metal Induced Crystallization and Polysilicon Thin Film Transistors: Novel technologies of crystallization and post-annealing

Nowadays,active-matrix addressing using a-Si TFTs is dominating in the flat panel display markets. However, low temperature polysilicon has been proposed and considered to be a promising alternative technology. Metal induced crystallization (MIC) is one of the methods to obtain high quality polysilicon films at low temperatures. A few technologies are presented in this monograph, which improve the quality of MIC polysilicon film and hence the performance of TFTs built on. Amelioration of MIC processes has been made to produce high performance polysilicon TFTs using solution based MIC (SMIC) and defined-grain MIC (DG-MIC) methods. Novel post-annealing technologies are also introduced to reduce the micro-defects in MIC polysilicon film and hence to achieve better performance. These technologies include YAG laser post-annealing and flash lamp post-annealing. Particularly, it is the first time to report the application of flash lamp annealing technology in the fabrication of low temperature polysilicon and TFTs.