The low‐temperature‐processed amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) exhibit remarkable potentials in large‐area, flexible, and hybrid‐integrated electronics, while the performance and stability of AOS devices highly depend on the proper manipulation of abundant native defects in AOS, especially for AOS Schottky barrier diode (SBD) with the naturally defective metal–semiconductor interface. Here, a hydrogenated‐InGaZnO SBD with a hydrogen‐rich passivation layer (PL) is reported. With the hydrogenation effectively suppressing interface defects and meanwhile donating electrons, a near‐ideal Schottky contact and more‐conductive drift region are simultaneously achieved, as proven by the perfect ideality factor of 1.08, a Schottky barrier height of 0.87 eV, a high rectification ratio ≈4.5 × 108. Moreover, such sophisticated hydrogenation is self‐stabilized by the bilayer structure of PL, contributing to the record‐high stabilities under harsh environmental and electrical stresses.
As amorphous oxide semiconductors (AOSs) are hotly pursued for advanced displays, flexible electronics, optoelectronics, and neuromorphic systems, the AOS Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) have been tried only using the mainstream amorphous InGaZnO (a‐IGZO) and the conservative bottom‐anode structure. To deepen the study on AOS SBDs, the more challenging top‐anode SBD is developed in this work using a versatile but vulnerable AOS, amorphous InZnO (a‐IZO). Unsurprisingly, the Schottky interface defects are seriously increased by the top‐anode process and the defective a‐IZO, which cannot be effectively passivated using the incumbent oxidizing treatments. The hydrogenation is proposed to considerably suppress these annoying interface defects and thus correspondingly reduces the large leakage current, while the hydrogen doping easily deteriorates a‐IGZO SBD. The underlying mechanism of such distinction is revealed to be the tricky interactions between defect and hydrogen in AOSs. Based on the sophisticated utilization of such defect‐hydrogen interplay, the a‐IZO/a‐IGZO stack is hydrogenated together to simultaneously realize a high‐conductivity bulk and low‐defect interface, noticeably enhancing the performance metrics. Such top‐anode SBD based on hydrogenated multilayer AOSs successfully blazes a novel evolution path for AOS SBDs.
The nonideal reverse leakage current of amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide (a-IGZO) Schottky barrier diode was comparatively investigated with and without the passivation layer. Based on experimental and simulation results, the underlying mechanism was revealed as the trap-assisted tunneling along the defective a-IGZO sidewall. The edge termination structures, dubbed “sidewall covering,” and “edge capping” were specifically proposed to mitigate the edge electric field and, thus, suppress the nonideal leakage current. This enables the simultaneously improved ideality factor ( n) and Schottky barrier height ( ΦB), respectively, of 1.16 and 1.13 eV, together with the noticeably enhanced breakdown voltage.
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