Influences of vacuum annealing induced oxygen defects on the transfer characteristics of a-ITO thin-film transistors

Amorphous indium–tin-oxide (a-ITO) films are fabricated by pulsed laser deposition at room temperature and annealed in vacuum. Although vacuum annealing could ameliorate the carrier mobility and subthreshold swing, the threshold voltage shows a negative shift upon vacuum annealing at 450 K, and a hump emerges in the subthreshold region. The density of electronic states extracted by Grünewald method demonstrate that the hump is caused by shallow donor-like states. Furthermore, the X-ray photoelectron spectra and the photoconductivity experiment reveal that the shallow donors are ascribed to the increased oxygen defects upon thermal annealing.