Kah Yoong Chan

• Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are the key element in the low cost large area electronics such as flat panel displays and sensor arrays. TFTs based on amorphous and polycrystalline silicon are the current industrial standard. However, amorphous silicon transistors are limited by the low charge carrier mobility and device stability, whereas polycrystalline silicon transistors are still relatively expensive due to the needs for additional annealing and/or crystallization steps. Microcrystalline silicon transistors have recently emerged to combine the distinctive advantages of both technologies with the exclusion of their disadvantages. In this thesis, transistors with distinctively high charge carrier mobilities exceeding 50 cm2/Vs were realized, which are more than 50 times higher than amorphous silicon transistors. Several aspects were investigated following the realization of transistors with high charge carrier mobility. These include the correlation of the material properties with the device properties, the influence of contact effects and post-fabrication thermal annealing on the transistor performances. In addition to these, inverter circuits based on microcrystalline silicon transistors were realized and the influence of the transistor parameters on the performance of the inverters were investigated.