Contact resistance improvement using interfacial silver nanoparticles in amorphous indium-zinc-oxide thin film transistors

We describe an approach to reduce the contact resistance at compositional conducting/semiconducting indium-zinc-oxide (IZO) homojunctions used for contacts in thin film transistors (TFTs). By introducing silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) at the homojunction interface between the conducting IZO electrodes and the amorphous IZO channel, we reduce the specific contact resistance, obtained by transmission line model measurements, down to ∼10−2 Ω cm2, ∼3 orders of magnitude lower than either NP-free homojunction contacts or solid Ag metal contacts. The resulting back-gated TFTs with Ag NP contacts exhibit good field effect mobility of ∼27 cm2/V s and an on/off ratio >107. We attribute the improved contact resistance to electric field concentration by the Ag NPs.