Tuning Electrical Properties in Amorphous Zinc Tin Oxide Thin Films for Solution Processed Electronics

Solution processed zinc tin oxide (ZTO) thin film transistors (TFTs) were fabricated by varying the Zn/Sn composition. The addition of Sn to the zinc oxide (ZnO) films resulted in improved electrical characteristics, with devices of Zn0.7Sn0.3O composition showing the highest mobility of 7.7 cm(2)/(V s). An improvement in subthreshold swings was also observed, indicative of a reduction of the interfacial trap densities. Mobility studies at low temperature have been carried out, which indicated that the activation energy was reduced with Sn incorporation. Kelvin probe force microscopy was performed on the films to evaluate work function and correlated to the metal-semiconductor barrier indicating Zn0.7Sn0.3O films had the smallest barrier for charge injection. Organic-inorganic hybrid complementary inverters with a maximum gain of 10 were fabricated by integrating ZTO TFTs with poly-3-hexylthiophene (P3HT) transistors.