Bridged-Grain Polycrystalline Silicon Thin-Film Transistors

We introduce a new structure for low-temperature polycrystalline silicon thin-film transistors (TFTs). This bridged-grain structure can reduce the threshold voltage and the subthreshold swing, increase the on-off ratio, and suppress leakage current and kink effect of TFTs significantly. This technique can be applied to all polycrystalline silicon TFTs, including those made by solid-phase crystallization, metal-induced crystallization, metal-induced lateral crystallization, and excimer laser annealing.