Oxide TFTs on flexible substrates for designing and fabricating analog-to-digital converters

Abstract

Thin-film transistors (TFTs) employing oxide semiconductors have recently emerged in electronics, offering excellent performance and stability, low processing temperature and large area processing, being indium-gallium-zinc oxide (IGZO) the most popular amorphous oxide semiconductor. In this work it is shown how IGZO TFTs can be integrated with multilayer high-κ dielectrics to obtain low operating voltages, both on glass and flexible PEN substrates. Then, the electrical properties extracted from these devices are used to design and simulate a 2nd-order Sigma-Delta (ΣΔ) analog-to-digital converter (ADC), showing superior performance (e.g. SNDR ≈ 57 dB, and DR ≈ 65 dB) over ADCs using competing thin-film technologies.