Polymer Doping Enables a Two-Dimensional Electron Gas for High-Performance Homojunction Oxide Thin-Film Transistors

Abstract

High-performance solution-processed metal oxide (MO) thin-film transistors (TFTs) are realized by fabricating a homojunction of indium oxide (In₂ O₃ ) and polyethylenimine (PEI)-doped In₂ O₃ (In₂ O₃ :x% PEI, x = 0.5-4.0 wt%) as the channel layer. A two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) is thereby achieved by creating a band offset between the In₂ O₃ and PEI-In₂ O₃ via work function tuning of the In₂ O₃ :x% PEI, from 4.00 to 3.62 eV as the PEI content is increased from 0.0 (pristine In₂ O₃ ) to 4.0 wt%, respectively. The resulting devices achieve electron mobilities greater than 10 cm² V^-1 s^-1 on a 300 nm SiO₂ gate dielectric. Importantly, these metrics exceed those of the devices composed of the pristine In₂ O₃ materials, which achieve a maximum mobility of ≈4 cm² V^-1 s^-1 . Furthermore, a mobility as high as 30 cm² V^-1 s^-1 is achieved on a high-k ZrO₂ dielectric in the homojunction devices. This is the first demonstration of 2DEG-based homojunction oxide TFTs via band offset achieved by simple polymer doping of the same MO material.

Keywords: 2D electron gases; PEI-doped In2O3; homojunctions; oxide electronics.