VLSI Processing of Amorphous Silicon Alloy P-I-N Diodes For Active Matrix Applications

ABSTRACTA number of new amorphous silicon alloy microelectronic devices, including LCD active matrix displays, linear image sensors, and thin film multilayer computer memories, have been developed in our company. These applications rely heavily on the quality of the intrinsic semiconductor as well as its ability to withstand the many processing steps used in a modern photolithographic process. In this paper, we present electrical data on amorphous silicon alloy p-i-n diodes after such a process. These devices have an active area of 20μm × 20μm defined using standard photolithographic techniques and etched using a dry etch process. These diodes are characterized by ideality factors (n) of 1.4 and extrapolated reverse saturation current densities of 1013A/cm2h. The diodes exhibit nearly 10 orders of magnitude rectification at ± 3V and the reverse bias current density remains below 10-8 A/cm2 for reverse bias voltages of -15V. In pulsed forward bias, these diodes can be operated at current densities greater than 300A/cm2. Thin film amorphous silicon diodes moreover have the advantage that varying the thickness of the intrinsic layer allows the optimization of parameters such as the capacitance per unit area, the reverse bias current density and the forward bias conductance per unit area. We find that these devices are fully compatible with state of the art VLSI processing techniques and are suitable for applications in integrated circuit structures, for example rectification devices in microelectronic arrays and isolation devices in display matrices.