Amorphous- and polycrystalline-silicon semiconductor devices

 In recent years amorphous and polycrystalline silicon have become important for a number of applications, e.g., for the fabrication of thin-film transistors used in flat-panel displays. Early investigations were carried out, based on a steady-state implementation [18,71,76]. Later, a systematic investigation was carried out about the generation-recombination mechanisms involving deep and tail states within the energy gap. A significant achievement came from exploiting the local nature of the continuity equations for the gap states: it led to incorporating the dynamics of these states into the customary model used for crystalline material, without increasing the number of partial-differential equations to be solved. An extensive activity for the analysis and model validation of amorphous- and polycrystalline-silicon devices, in the steady-state, small-signal, and transient regimes, and incorporating different types of tunnel mechanisms that are relevant for the device functioning, has been carried out. Most of it is in the frame of national or international collaboration with Laboratories where thin-film transistors are fabricated [38,39,44,50,97,98,99,103,105,107,114,116,138].