ZnO based photo-thin-film-transistors with actively tunable photoresponse in the visible spectrum

Zinc oxide, ZnO, is an important material for wide range of optoelectronic device applications. Especially, ZnO is famous with its large exciton binding energy of 60 meV which makes it a good candidate for ultraviolet light emitting diodes and lasers. Moreover, its high carrier mobility and wide band gap of 3.37 eV (368 nm) makes it a promising material for transparent electronics and UV photodetectors. However, ZnO has crystallographic defect states (e.g. oxygen vacancies, zinc interstitials) which degrade the performance of ZnO based LEDs, lasers and UV photodiodes. In this thesis, ZnO based photo-thin-film-transistors (photo-TFTs) with visible light response by using their defect states to absorb subbandgap photons are investigated. The design, fabrication and characterization of ZnO based photoTFTs are presented. A photo-TFT is a three-terminal optoelectronic device that is a photoconductor structure with an additional gate terminal which actively tunes electrical and optical properties of photoconductive material. In a clean room environment, ZnO based photo-TFTs with various device sizes are fabricated at different ZnO channel layer deposition temperatures (ranging from 80 to 250 °C). Initially, TFT characteristics of fabricated devices are characterized to show that the gate terminal dynamically modulates ZnO’s channel conductivity. Moreover, the effects of the device size and the deposition temperature on device performance are investigated. Then, the optical characterization of ZnO film deposited at 250° C is conducted via absorption and photoluminescence measurements in order to investigate its visible light absorption characteristics and the energy levels of its defect states in the forbidden band gap of ZnO. After that, the responsivity measurements are reported from ZnO based photo-TFTs fabricated at 250 °C and the active tuning mechanism of visible light photoresponse is discussed. Finally, the effects of the deposition temperature and the device size on the visible light responsivity are presented.