Grit is in our blood – true, we are born with blood but in
our Integrated Nanotechnology Lab we transform that. We add grit into that.
Amir Hanna et al. made 6 revisions to
get the paper entitled, “Area and Energy Efficient High Performance ZnO Wavy
Channel Thin Film Transistor” into IEEE Trans. Elect. Dev. (TED). In this paper
we show increased output current while maintaining low power consumption in
thin film transistors (TFTs) is essential for future generation large-area
high-resolution displays. Here, we show wavy channel (WC) architecture in thin
film transistor allows the expansion of the transistor width in the direction
perpendicular to the substrate through integrating continuous fin features on
the underlying substrate. This architecture enables expanding the TFT width
without consuming any additional chip area, thus enabling increased performance
while maintaining the real estate integrity. The experimental WCTFTs show a
linear increase in output current as a function of number of fins per device
resulting in 3.5x increase in output current when compared to planar
counterparts that consume the same chip area. The new architecture also allows
tuning the threshold voltage as a function of the number of fin features
included in the device, as threshold voltage linearly decreased from 6.8 V for planar
device to 2.6 V for WC devices with 32 fins. This makes the new architecture
more power efficient as lower operation voltages could be used for WC devices
compared to planar counterparts. It was also found that field effect mobility
linearly increases with the number of fins included in the device, showing
almost 1.8x enhancements in the field effect mobility than that of the planar
counterparts. This can be attributed to higher electric field in the channel
due to the fin architecture, and threshold voltage shift.
Kudos for the bravery Amir N. Hanna, Mohamed T. Ghoneim, Rabab
R. Bahabry, Aftab M. Hussain, Hossain M. Fahad, and Muhammad M. Hussain for
your grit to add another TED!
What a beautiful way to start the month of blessings …