Rodrigo Martins

In this work, it is demonstrated the application of a high k dielectric, as hafnium oxide (HfO2), in poly-Si thin film transistors (TFTs) obtained by metal induced lateral crystallization (MILC). The dielectric layer was deposited at room temperature by sputtering, using argon and oxygen as process gases. As produced TFTs exhibit field effect mobility around 45 cm2 V-1 s-1and Ion/Ioff ratio of about 2 × 105. After annealing in a forming gas atmosphere for about 1 h at 200 °C, the threshold voltage and the sub-threshold slope are reduced, respectively from 4.8 to 2 V and from 1.6 to 1.4 V/dec. Nevertheless, by doing so, we notice a reduction on the field effect mobility of about 45% and a decrease of about 2.5 times on the Ion/Ioff ratio. Longer annealing time will not improve the TFT's performance. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In this paper a new approach is presented for the simulation of spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) data to estimate the level of nickel (Ni) contamination in silicon crystallized by metal induced crystallization (MIC). The method employs the addition of Ni as reference for a Bruggemann effective medium approximation (BEMA) to simulate the optical response of the crystallized silicon. This new approach is sensitive to changes in the initial average metal thickness used on the crystallization process to thickness values as low as 0.05 nm. This corresponds to a volume fraction of 0.24%, confirmed by Rutherford backscattering spectrometry (RBS) where it was observed that the Ni volume fraction detected by SE varies linearly with the metal amount inside the crystallized films determined by RBS. © 2008.

In this work, we investigate the role of amorphous silicon (a-Si:H) thin films deposited by a plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD) technique on porous silicon (PS) to facilitate its water vapor and oxygen gas sensing properties using its electrical response. Overall we notice a rectifying behavior from a-Si:H/PS heterojunction device, where a current enhancement of one and four orders of magnitude was observed in the presence of oxygen gas and water vapor, in comparison with atmospheric air at room temperature, respectively. The photoluminescence (PL) investigation of PS shows a slight blue shift in the PL emission band from 1.72 to 1.77 eV and the intensity of the PL is enhanced by a factor of 5.4 with increase of porosity from 21% to 77%. This PL emission may originate from the O-Si-H related absorbance bands. Alternatively, quenching of the PL intensity was observed after a-Si:H films were deposited on PS specimens. Besides, micro-Raman and atomic force microscopic (AFM) analyse were carried out to understand the structure and morphological features of the PS and a-Si:H/PS specimens. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Thin film transistors (TFTs) have been produced by rf magnetron sputtering at room temperature, using non conventional oxide materials like amorphous indium-zinc-oxide (IZO) semiconductor, for the channel as well as for the drain and source regions. The obtained TFTs operate in the enhancement mode with threshold voltages of 2.4 V, saturation mobility of 22.7 cm2/Vs, gate voltage swing of 0.44 V/dec and an ON/OFF current ratio of 7×10 7. The high performances presented by these TFTs associated to a high electron mobility, at least two orders of magnitude higher than that of conventional amorphous silicon TFTs and a low threshold voltage, opens new doors for applications in flexible, wearable, disposable portable electronics as well as battery-powered applications.

In the present work, the spectroscopic ellipsometry (1.5 - 5.5 eV) was used to investigate the effects of current density induced microstructural variations and their influence on the electronic states of as-prepared and a-Si:H coated porous silicon (PS). The pseudodielectric responses of the low and high current densities (5 and 40 mA/cm2) were analyzed using a multilayer model within the effective medium approximation. The FTIR investigation reveals me enhancement of surface oxide (Si-Ox) layer with current density and the improvement of the Si-Hx band after a-Si:H coating.

Indium tin oxide (ITO) has been used as the prefered electrode material for the emerging area of transparent electronics, namely for thin-film transistors (TFTs) based on oxide semiconductors. This work pretends to investigate different materials to replace ITO in inverted-staggered TFTs based on gallium-indium-zinc oxide (GIZO), one of the most promissing oxide semiconductors for TFTs. The analyzed electrode materials are indium-zinc oxide (IZO), Ti, Mo and Ti/Au. Devices are analyzed with special focus on the contact resistance fundamentals, including the extraction of source/ drain series resistances and TFTs intrinsic parameters, such as intrinsic mobility (p\) and intrinsic threshold voltage (V Ti). The obtained contact resistance values are between 10 kΩ and 20 kΩ, and the best devices have field effect mobility ((μ FE) close to 25 cm 2/V s and on/off ratio close to 10 8. © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

Transparent wide band gap indium molybdenum oxide (IMO) thin films were rf sputtered on glass substrates at room temperature. The films were studied as a function of sputtering power (ranging 40-180 W) and sputtering time (ranging 2.5-20 min). The film thickness was varied in the range 50-400 nm. The as-deposited films were characterized by their structural (XRD), morphological (AFM), electrical (Hall Effect measurements) and optical (visible-NIR spectroscopy) properties. XRD studies revealed that the films are amorphous for the sputtering power ≤ 100 W and the deposition time ≤ 5 min, and the rest are polycrystalline with a strong reflection from (222) plane showing a preferential orientation. A minimum bulk resistivity of 2.65 × 10- 3 Ω cm and a maximum carrier concentration of 4.16 × 1020 cm- 3 are obtained for the crystalline films sputtered at 180 W (10 min). Whereas a maximum mobility (19.5  cm2 V- 1 s- 1) and average visible transmittance (∼ 85%) are obtained for the amorphous films sputtered at 80 W and 100 W respectively for 10 min. A minimum transmittance (∼ 18%) was obtained for the crystalline films sputtered at 180 W (∼ 305 nm thick). The optical band gap was found varying between 3.75 and 3.90 eV for various sputtering parameters. The obtained results are analyzed and corroborated with the structure of the films. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper reports on a method and a test setup developed to measure the transient dark current and the spectral response characteristics of a-Si:H MIS photosensors. Using this method the segmented-gate/SiNx/a Si:H/n +/ITO structures have been characterized under different biasing conditions. The dependences of the dark and light signals on the refresh pulse amplitude, offset voltage and pulse width were measured and analyzed. It is found that the amplitude of the time-dependent component of the leakage current associated with charge trapping at the insulator-semiconductor interface can be significantly reduced by adjusting the offset voltage. The observed bias dependence of the spectral response characteristics is explained by analyzing the charge carrier transport in the absorption layer at different wavelengths of the incident light. © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

Co-doped TiO 2 films were characterized by spectroscopic ellipsometry to determine their thickness, deposition rate and optical properties as function of substance temperature and background gas composition. To fit the data we used a combination of a single Tauc-Lorentz oscillator with the Drude free electron model to take in account the free electrons present in the film. The Co doping and addition of H 2 to the gas phase during film growth cause the formation of a titanium oxide which containsfree electrons that absorb the energy of the red part of the spectrum, causing k to increase. The n of the film at 1.5 eV is about 2.3 eV. The fittings also show that the n of films decreases and k increase at the surface. This can be related to a segregation of Co to the surface, which in some cases, of high substrate temperature and high H 2 flow during deposition, can lead to and even higher concentration of free electrons at the surface. © 2008 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

To evaluate the evolution of a dark film formation on silver surface objects, several coupons were catalogued and place inside a museum, located in an urban area. The changes on these samples were measured by spectroscopic ellipsometry, in periods of months. This technique allows the reduction of the coupons exposure time, in several months, due to its high sensitivity to surface modifications, with acceptable results for the evaluation of its degradation. The thicknesses of the degradation layers and the optical properties of silver oxide, chloride and sulphide reference samples were determined using a mixture of Tauc-Lorentz and Drude models. The composition of the silver corrosion layer was determined by fitting the layer using a Bruggeman Effective Medium Approximation (BEMA) of the three products plus voids. It was found that the thickness of the layer depends in the placement of the coupons, namely, inside or outside displayers. The average film thickness after 6 months was of 180 Å and 280 Å, inside and outside the displayers, respectively. The main compounds found in the layers were the silver chlorides and sulphides, which composition changed with the thickness of the layer, and the exposition time. © 2008 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA.

We report the architecture and the performances of a memory based on a single field-effect transistor built on paper able to write-erase and read. The device is composed of natural multilayer cellulose fibers that simultaneously act as structural support and gate dielectric; active and passive multicomponent amorphous oxides that work as the channel and gate electrode layers, respectively, complemented by the use of patterned metal layers as source/drain electrodes. The devices exhibit a large counterclockwise hysteresis associated with the memory effect, with a turn-on voltage shift between 1 and -14.5 V, on/off ratio and saturation mobilities of about 104 and 40 cm 2 V-1 s-1, respectively, and estimated charge retention times above 14 000 h. © 2008 American Institute of Physics.

In this work we investigate the properties of a polymorphous silicon (pm-Si:H) metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) structure used in 3D position sensitive detectors (PSD). For the first time a 3D sensor made-up by pm-Si:H/SiO2/Au layers is presented. MIS structures present several advantages over p-i-n structures, such as easier fabrication, fast response time and higher resolution. The 1D MIS PSD that constitute the array were extensively studied aiming its application in 3D pattern recognition. The results obtained show that MIS PSD can achieve non-linearities below 2% and sensitivities of 3.2 μA/cm over 6 mm length sensors. The miniaturization of the sensors length to arrays of 6 and 16 mm, respectively showed average non-linearities of about 1.9% for the 16 mm sensor which proved to be the best solution for this MIS structure. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Staggered bottom gate transparent thin film transistors (TTFTs) have been produced by rf magnetron sputtering at room temperature, using amorphous indium-zinc-oxide (IZO) semiconductor, for the channel as well as for the drain and source regions. The obtained TTFTs operate in the enhancement mode with threshold voltages of 2.4 V, saturation mobility of 22.7 cm2/Vs, gate voltage swing of 0.44 V/dec and an ON/OFF current ratio of 7×10 7. The high performances presented by these TTFTs produced at room temperature, make these TFTs a promising candidate for flexible, wearable, disposable portable electronics as well as battery-powered applications.

In this paper we demonstrate the use of amorphous binary In2O3-ZnO oxides simultaneously as active channel layer and as source/drain regions in transparent thin film transistor (TTFT), processed at room temperature by rf sputtering. The TTFTs operate in the enhancement mode and their performances are thickness dependent. The best TTFTs exhibit saturation mobilities higher than 102 cm2/Vs, threshold voltages lower than 6 V, gate voltage swing of 0.8 V/dec and an on/off current ratio of 107. This mobility is at least two orders of magnitude higher than that of conventional amorphous silicon TFTs and comparable to or even better than other polycrystal-line semiconductors. © 2007 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.

Amorphous/nanocrystalline silicon p i′ i i′ n devices fabricated on micromachined glass substrates are integrated with oligonucleotide-derivatized gold nanoparticles for a colorimetric detection method. The method enables the specific detection and quantification of unamplified nucleic acid sequences (DNA and RNA) without the need to functionalize the glass surface, allowing for resolution of single nucleotide differences between DNA and RNA sequences-single nucleotide polymorphism and mutation detection. The detector's substrate is glass and the sample is directly applied on the back side of the biosensor, ensuring a direct optical coupling of the assays with a concomitant maximum photon capture and the possibility to reuse the sensor. © 2007 American Institute of Physics.

In this work Spectroscopic Ellipsometry (SE) was used to study metal induced crystallization (MIC) on amorphous silicon films in order to analyze the influence of different annealing conditions on their structural properties. The variation of the metal thickness has shown to be determinant on the time needed to full crystallize silicon films. Films of 100 nm thickness crystallize after 2h at 500°C using 1 nm of Ni deposited on it. When reducing the average metal thickness down to 0.05 nm the same silicon film will need almost 10 hours to be totally crystallized. Using a new approach on the modelling procedure of the SE data we show to be possible to determine the Ni remaining inside the crystallized films. The method consists in using Ni as reference on the Bruggeman Effective Medium Approximation (BEMA) layer that will simulated the optical response of the crystallized silicon. Silicon samples and metal layers with different thicknesses were analyzed and this new method has shown to be sensible to changes on the initial metal/silicon ratio. The nickel distribution inside the silicon layers was independently measured by Rutherford Backscattering Spectroscopy (RBS) to check the data obtained from the proposed approach. © 2006 Materials Research Society.

Nanostructured silicon thin films were produced in a single PECVD (Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition) reactor using an excitation frequency of 27.12 MHz. The process parameters were selected to allow the films' production to be performed at the transition region (from amorphous to microcrystalline), aiming their use in solar cells. The real and imaginary parts of pseudo-dielectric function of these nanostructured films show a shift to higher energies and the order factor reveals an improvement on the short atomic range order of the films produced. The solar cells with a structure of ZGO/p-a-SiC:H/buffer1/buffer2/i-(nc/a-Si:H)/n-a-Si:H/Ag/Al were deposited with nanostructured intrinsic layer, showing a good performances, with current densities of about 14.48 mA/cm2, open circuit voltage of 0.94 V, and fill factor of 0.67, which lead to efficiencies of 9.12%. The solar cell degradation study performed under AM1.5 spectrum conditions up to 100 hours revealed a decrease on the solar cell efficiency of about 8.11%, mainly related to the decreasing of current density. Despite that, the open circuit voltage increases slightly after the degradation.

This work shows the effect of the annealing temperature and atmosphere on the properties of r.f. magnetron sputtered indium-zinc oxide (IZO) thin-films of two types: one a conductive film (as-deposited, room temperature) that exhibits a resistivity of 3.5 × 10- 4 Ω cm; the other, a semiconductor film with a resistivity ∼ 102 Ω cm. The annealing temperatures were changed between 125 and 500 °C. Crystallization of the more conductive films was already noticeable at temperatures around 400 °C. Three different annealing atmospheres were used - vacuum, air and oxygen. For the conductive films, only the oxygen atmosphere was critical, leading to an increase of the electrical resistivity of more than one order of magnitude, for temperatures of 250 °C and above. Concerning the semiconductor films, both temperature and atmosphere had a strong effect on the film's properties, and the resistivity of the annealed films was always considerably smaller than the as-deposited films. Finally, some results of the application of these films to transparent TFTs are shown. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Indium molybdenum oxide thin films were RF sputtered at room temperature on glass substrates with a reference base pressure of 7.5 × 10- 4 Pa. The electrical and optical properties of the films were studied as a function of oxygen partial pressures (OPP) ranging from 1.5 × 10- 3 Pa to 3.5 × 10- 3 Pa. The obtained data show that the bulk resistivity of the films increased by about 4 orders of magnitude (from 7.9 × 10- 3 to 7.6 × 101 Ω-cm) when the OPP increased from 1.5 × 10-3 to 3.5 × 10- 3 Pa, and the carrier concentration decreased by about 4 orders (from 1.77 × 1020 to 2.31 × 1016 cm- 3). On the other hand, the average visible transmittance of 30.54% of the films (brown colour; OPP = 1.5 × 10- 3 Pa) was increased with increasing OPP to a maximum of 80.47% (OPP = 3.5 × 10- 3 Pa). The optical band gap calculated from the absorption edge of the transmittance spectra ranges from 3.77 to 3.88 eV. Further, the optical and electrical properties of the films differ from those deposited at similar conditions but with a base pressure lower than 7.5 × 10- 4 Pa. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In this work we present a study on the effect of annealing temperatures on the structural, morphological, electrical and optical characteristics of gallium doped zinc oxide (GZO), indium zinc oxide (IZO) and indium-tin-oxide (ITO) films. GZO and IZO films were deposited at room temperature by r.f. magnetron sputtering, whereas the ITO films were commercial ones purchased from Balzers. All films were annealed at temperatures of 250 and 500 °C in open air for 1 h. The GZO and ITO films were polycrystalline. The amorphous structure of as-deposited IZO films becomes crystalline on high temperature annealing (500 °C). The sheet resistivity increased with increase in annealing temperature. GZO films showed an increase of 6 orders of magnitude. The optical transmittance and band gap of as-deposited films varied with annealing. The highest transmittance (over 95 %) and maximum band gap (3.93 eV) have been obtained for ITO films. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Nitrogen-doped ZnO films were deposited by RF magnetron sputtering in 75% of N2 / (Ar + N2) gas atmosphere. The influence of substrate temperature ranging from room temperature (RT) to 300 °C was analyzed by X-ray diffractometry (XRD), spectrophotometry, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), secondary-ion mass spectrometry (SIMS) and Hall measurements setup. The XRD studies confirmed the hexagonal ZnO structure and showed that the crystallinity of these films increased with increasing substrate temperature (Ts). The optical studies indicate the average visible transmittance in the wavelength ranging 500-800 nm increases with increasing Ts. A minimum transmittance (9.84%) obtained for the films deposited at RT increased with increasing Ts to a maximum of 88.59% at 300 °C (500-800 nm). Furthermore, it was understood that the band gap widens with increasing Ts from 1.99 eV (RT) to 3.30 eV (250 °C). Compositional analyses (XPS and SIMS) confirmed the nitrogen (N) incorporation into the ZnO films and its decreasing concentration with increasing Ts. The negative sign of Hall coefficients confirmed the n-type conducting. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Nitrogen (N)-doped ZnO thin films were RF sputtered with different N2 volume (ranging from 10% to 100%) on sapphire (001) substrates. The influence of N2 vol.% on the properties of ZnO films was analyzed by various characterization techniques. The X-ray diffraction studies showed that the films grow along the preferential (002) crystallographic plane and the crystallinity varied with varying N2 vol.%. The films sputtered with 25 vol.% N2 showed better crystallinity. The transmittance was decreased with increasing N2 volume until 25% and was almost constant above 25%. A maximum optical band gap (2.08 eV) obtained for 10 vol.% N2 decreased with increasing N2 volume to reach a minimum of 1.53 eV at 100%. The compositional analysis confirmed the incorporation of N into ZnO films, and its concentration increased with increasing N2 volume to reach a maximum of ∼ 3.7 × 1021 atom/cm3 at 75% but then decreased slightly to 3.42 × 1021 atoms/cm3. The sign of Hall coefficient confirmed that the films sputtered with ≤ 25 vol.% N2 possess p-type conductivity which changes to n-type for > 25 vol.% N2. © 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The devices analyzed in this work present an S-shape J-V characteristic when illuminated. By changing the light flux a non linear dependence of the photocurrent with illumination is observed. Thus a low intensity light beam can be used to probe the local illumination conditions, since a relationship exists between the probe beam photocurrent and the steady state illumination. Numerical simulation studies showed that the origin of this S-shape lies in a reduced electric field across the intrinsic region, which causes an increase in the recombination losses. Based on this, we present a model for the device consisting of a modulated barrier recombination junction in addition to the p-i-n junction. The simulated results are in good agreement with the experimental data. Using the presented model a good estimative of the LSP signal under different illumination conditions can be obtained, thus simplifying the development of applications using the LSP as an image sensor, with advantages over the existing imaging systems in the large area sensor fields with the low cost associated to the amorphous silicon technology. © 2007 Materials Research Society.

Here we describe an innovative optoelectronic platform which enables the specific detection of unamplified nucleic acid sequences with the integration of oligonucleotide-derivatized gold nanoparticles, a colour sensor and a light emission source for a colorimetric detection method. This new low cost, fast and simple optoelectronic platform permits detection of less than 1 picomole quantities of nucleic acid without target or signal amplification. ©2007 IEEE.