Pulsed laser crystallization of amorphous silicon for polysilicon flat panel imagers

Pulsed excimer-laser processing of amorphous silicon on glass substrates enables the fabrication of high-quality polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin-film transistors. Here we describe the fabrication and testing of prototype imagers fabricated in CMOS poly-Si using a low-temperature, laser-crystallization process on glass substrates. Integrated shift registers and buffers for driving the gate lines of the array and integrated multiplexers on the data lines have been produced and are shown to run the imagers successfully without using external gate-line electronics. In addition, a three-transistor poly-Si circuit has been fabricated at each pixel, providing a charge gain of 11 for the small photo signal and a low noise level of 1200 electrons RMS.