A High-Voltage Serial-In-Parallel-Out Shift Register With Amorphous Silicon TFTs

In this paper, we proposed a high-voltage serial-in-parallel-out (SIPO) shift register based on amorphous silicon thin-film transistors (a-Si TFTs). We provided a detailed introduction of the bootstrap inverter, the key component of the proposed shift register, and presented the simulation and analysis of one-stage and five-stage SIPO shift registers, respectively. Then we fabricated the five-stage SIPO shift registers employing a-Si TFTs. Both the simulation results and experimental results show that the proposed SIPO shift register is capable of transmitting a 50 V high voltage pulse signal with a clock frequency of 20 kHz and is expected to be an important building block for the applications of digital microfluidics.