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Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, CIEEM, Room 9019, CII, 110 8th Street, Troy, NY 12180-3590, USA
b
Pennsylvania State University, 121 Electrical Engineering East, University Park, PA 16802, USA
Received 28 December 2001; received in revised form 7 February 2002; accepted 16 April 2002
Abstract
We report on the contact resistances for pentacene thin lm transistors with two dierent designs: top and bottom
contact congurations (referred to as TC and BC TFTs, respectively) for two dierent contact metals (gold and palladium). The extraction was done based on the dependencies of the channel resistances on the gate length and gate
voltage. The extracted gold TC TFT contact resistance depends on VGS , but shows no dependence on the drain bias. The
TC TFT contact resistance is comparable to or exceeds the channel resistance for channels shorter than approximately
10 lm. The contact resistance of BC TFTs depends both on gate and drain bias. We propose a circuit simulating the BC
TFT contact resistance and verify the circuit applicability by extracting and comparing the TFT channel resistances at
dierent drain voltages. Our results reveal an important role played by contact resistances and provide an accurate
model of the contact phenomena suitable for implementation in Spice or other circuit simulators.
2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
1. Introduction
A remarkable progress has been achieved in organic
thin lm transistor (OTFT) technology (see, for example, a resent report of the eld eect mobility as high as
3.2 cm2 /V s [1]). OTFT contact resistance must be also
improved in order to make these devices competitive
with more conventional amorphous Si and poly-Si
TFTs. It was shown earlier [2] that the OTFT design
aected the contact performance. Preliminary results of
OTFT contact resistance extraction by Klauck [3]
demonstrated that OTFT contact resistance was a substantial part of the total TFT resistance; especially for
relatively short channel L < 15 lm OTFTs.
In this paper we present results of contact resistance
extraction in the pentacene OTFTs. We also present a
0038-1101/02/$ - see front matter 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
PII: S 0 0 3 8 - 1 1 0 1 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 2 0 4 - 6
260
The BC TFTs have palladium contacts, pre-patterned by lift-o process and deposited on the gate dielectric prior to the pentacene active layer deposition
(see Fig. 1(b)).
The contact metal of 50 nm thickness was deposited
by ion-beam sputtering process. The contacts and gate
dielectric were clean by ozone and treated by a selfassembling agent before the pentacene active layer deposition [5]. The resulting BC TFTs had L 110, 60, 30
and 20 lm, with W 250 lm.
(source drain contacts) in series with the channel resistance RCh , which (at low VDS values) is a function of L
and VGS . Therefore, the RC is given by the intercept of
the total TFT resistance RT RC RCh vs. L plot at
L 0 (see Fig. 3). The extracted RC as a function of VGS
is shown in Fig. 4. The RT vs. L graph slope yields a
Fig. 3. Gold TC TFT (W 1200 lm) total resistance at different VGS as a function of L.
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5. Conclusion
We presented results of the contact resistance extraction for Pd and gold TC and Pd BC pentacene
Acknowledgements
DARPA (Program Monitor Dr. G. Henderson) has
supported this research under contract #N 61331-98-C0021 via subcontract from Sarno Corporation.
References
[1] Schon JH, Kloc Ch, Batlogg B. Org Electron 2000;1:57.
[2] Necliudov PV, Shur MS, Gundlach DJ, Jackson TN. J Appl
Phys 2000;88:6594.
[3] Klauk H, private communications.
[4] Lin YY, Gundlach DJ, Nelson SF, Jackson TN. IEEE
Trans Electron Dev 1997;44(8):3205.
[5] Jackson TN, Lin YY, Gundlach DJ, Klauk H. IEEE J Sel
Top Quant Electron 1998;4:100.
[6] Necliudov PV, Shur MS, Gundlach DJ, Jackson TN. MRS
Fall 2000 Meeting, Symposium JJ, Abstract #JJ 7.10, 2000.