Ultraviolet/ozone and oxygen plasma treatments for improving the contact of carbon nanotube thin film transistors

Carbon nanotube thin film transistor(CNT-TFT) is an emerging technology for future macroelectronics,such as chemical and biological sensors,optical detectors,and the backplane driving circuits for flat panel displays.The mostly reported fabrication method of CNT-TFT is a lift-off based photolithography process.In such fabrication process,photoresist(PR) residue contaminates the interface of tube-metal contact and deteriorates the device performance.In this paper,ultraviolet ozone(UVO) and oxygen plasma treatments were employed to remove the PR contamination.Through our well-designed experiments,the UVO treatment is confirmed an effective way of cleaning contamination at the tube-metal interface,while oxygen plasma treatment is too reactive and hard to control,which is not appropriate for CNT-TFTs.It is determined that 2–6 min UVO treatment is the preferred window,and the best optimized treatment time is 4 min,which leads to 15% enhancement of device performance.

Carbon nanotube thin film transistor （CNT-TFF） is an emerging technology for future macroelectronics, such as chemical and biological sensors, optical detectors, and the backplane driving circuits for flat panel displays. The mostly reported fabrication method of CNT-TFT is a lift-off based photolithography process. In such fabrication process, photoresist （PR） residue contaminates the interface of tube-metal contact and deteriorates the device performance. In this paper, ultraviolet ozone （UVO） and oxygen plasma treat- ments were employed to remove the PR contamination. Through our well-designed experiments, the UVO treatment is confirmed an effective way of cleaning contamination at the tube-metal interface, while oxygen plasma treatment is too reactive and hard to control, which is not appropriate for CNT-TFTs. It is determined that 2-6 rain UVO treatment is the preferred window, and the best optimized treatment time is 4 rain, which leads to 15% enhancement of device performance.