Enhanced Negative Bias Stress Degradation in Multigate Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistors

In this brief, a negative bias stress (NBS) induced degradation in n-type multigate polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin-film transistor (TFT) is investigated. It is observed that after NBS the transfer characteristic curves shift to the negative gate bias direction and multigate TFTs degrade more than the single-gate TFTs with the same effective channel length. The observed degradation phenomenon is explained with short channel effect that is resulted from the diffusion and distribution of hole carriers in the channel, which are generated in the source/drain depletion region and swept into the channel when the junctions are reversely biased during NBS. Pronounced NBS degradation caused by increased hole carriers in the channel is also verified in NBS experiment with light illumination.