Abstract
ZnO and its ternary alloy MgxZn1−xO (MZO) are promising wide-band-gap semiconductor materials well-suited to UV detection. The Mg content of MZO facilitates energy band gap engineering, enabling fabrication of UV photodetectors that can operate in the deep-UV region. Different types of UV photodetector based on ZnO have been reported, including photoconductive, Schottky, and transistor types. Transistor-based photodetectors have the advantage of being three-terminal devices, thus enabling biasing control and implementation in addressable arrays. In this paper we report an MZO thin-film-transistor (TFT)-based UV photodetector. The device has a low dark current (2 × 10−14 A) and an ON/OFF ratio of 1011. We show that by using a small amount of Mg (5%) in the MZO TFT we can substantially improve the photoresponse recovery time of the photodetector to 15 ms compared with 42 ms for a similar TFT with 0% Mg. We also observed a shift in the cutoff wavelength from 377.21 nm for the 0% Mg TFT photodetector down to 370.96 nm for the MZO TFT photodetector. We attribute the enhanced recovery time improvement of the MZO TFT UV photodetector to suppression of oxygen vacancies as a result of incorporation of the Mg in the MZO.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 3471-3476 |
Number of pages | 6 |
Journal | Journal of Electronic Materials |
Volume | 44 |
Issue number | 10 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Oct 5 2015 |
All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes
- Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials
- Condensed Matter Physics
- Electrical and Electronic Engineering
- Materials Chemistry
Keywords
- MgZnO
- UV photodetectors
- ZnO
- thin-film transistors