ZnO-Based Low-Voltage Inverter With Quantum-Well-Structured Nanohybrid Dielectric

We report on the fabrication of 2-V-operating ZnO-based inverter with two n-channel thin-film transistors (TFTs) on 22-nm-thin organic/inorganic nanohybrid dielectric, which contains $ \hbox{AlO}_{x}/\hbox{TiO}_{x}/\hbox{AlO}_{x}$ in triple-layer structure. The inverter shows a high voltage gain of $\sim$20 under the supply voltage $(V_{\rm DD})$ of 2 V but with a marginal transition voltage of 0.1 V (operation range of 0–2 V). To control the transition voltage to a more adequate value, an 8-V gate pulse was applied on driving ZnO-TFT so that some of the channel electrons would be tunneled through the $\hbox{AlO}_{x}$-based barrier and trapped in the $\hbox{TiO}_{x}$-based layer. Our inverter then displayed an optimum transition voltage of 0.75 V.