Quantum size impacts on the threshold voltage in nanocrystalline silicon thin film transistors

Based on the analysis of Poisson equation, an analytical threshold voltage model including quantum size effect of nc-TFTs (nanocrystalline silicon thin film transistor) has been proposed in this paper. The results demonstrate that the proposed simplified expression of threshold voltage agree perfectly with numerical calculation. The threshold voltage in nc-TFTs strongly depends on the size of silicon grain when the size of silicon grain is less than 20 nm. Such a strong dependent relation results from the large changes in the bandgap and dielectric constant due to quantum size effects when the size of silicon grain is in the regime of nano-scale. The theoretical investigation also demonstrates that the grain boundary trap density compared to the active dopant density gives a main contribution to the threshold voltage. This implies that the grain size must be larger than 30 nm in order to avoid threshold voltage variation from different technological processes. 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.