A Single-Crystalline, Epitaxial SrTiO3 Thin-Film Transistor

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that thermal annealing of epitaxial SrTiO3 thin films significantly improves their transistor performance, achieving characteristics comparable to bulk single crystals, which is promising for oxide electronics.

Contribution

It introduces a method to fabricate high-performance SrTiO3 thin-film transistors using single-crystalline epitaxial films with thermal annealing.

Findings

Annealed epitaxial SrTiO3 TFTs show high on/off ratio (>10^5).

Sub-threshold swing is approximately 2.1 V/decade.

Field-effect mobility is around 0.8 cm^2/Vs.

Abstract

We report herein fabrication and characterization of a thin-film transistor (TFT) using single-crystalline, epitaxial SrTiO3 film, which was grown by a pulsed laser deposition technique followed by the thermal annealing treatment in an oxygen atmosphere. Although TFTs on the polycrystalline epitaxial SrTiO3 films (as-deposited) exhibited poor transistor characteristics, the annealed single-crystalline SrTiO3 TFT exhibits transistor characteristics comparable with those of bulk single-crystal SrTiO3 FET: an on/off current ratio >10^5, sub-threshold swing ~2.1 V/decade, and field-effect mobility ~0.8 cm^2/Vs. This demonstrates the effectiveness of the appropriate thermal annealing treatment of epitaxial SrTiO3 films.