Recently, our research group A.P. Zhang Min and Zhang Jiaona published a study entitled “Design and Mechanism of Embedding Specific Carbon Nanotubes in Sputtered Sandwiched InGaZnO Thin Film Transistors”in EDL, with A.P. Zhang Min as the corresponding author and Zhang Jiaona as the first author.

In recent years, oxide semiconductor material, especially, amorphous indium gallium zinc oxide (a-IGZO) has drawn considerable attention for its application to the future display and large-area sensor systems. It owns better device uniformity and lower process cost than low temperature polysilicon, and relatively higher mobility than amorphous silicon. However, the future high-speed applications require even higher on current for the thin film transistors (TFTs). It is important to continue enhancing the performance of the a-IGZO TFTs, especially their drive capability.

In this work, we propose a new type of a-IGZO/CNT/a-IGZO (ACA) sandwiched channel for the TFTs. In this ACA channel, the high-purity metallic CNTs serve as high-speed carrier paths to improve the drive capability of the TFTs. Different conduction type and the location of the CNT paths are critical to determine the device performance. The optimum ACA-TFT achieves the high drive capability with mobility of 15.3 cm2/Vs and on current density of 4.35×10-2 μA/μm, which is almost twice as high as that of the pure a-IGZO TFT. This design provides a potential solution for high-speed TFTs used in advanced electronics for future applications.