Solid phase crystallization (SPC) of amorphous silicon films grown by low pressure chemical vapor deposition was conducted using a tube furnace in nitrogen ambient at temperatures ranging from 560 C to 1000 C. The transformed crystalline fraction shows typical sigmoidal curves as a function of annealing time using Raman analysis adopted in this work. Arrhenius plot of the measured incubation time does not fit to the straight line since SPC kinetics has strong temperature dependence and since the heating rate is slow when using a conventional heating method. The grain size decreases as the annealing temperature increases. It, however, is not sensitive to the annealing temperature beyond 800 C, since SPC kinetics is complete during the period of heatingup according to Raman spectroscopy. It was observed that doping of impurity atoms affect the crystallization kinetics. V C 2013 AIP Publishing LLC. [http://dx.

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A novel crystallization technology for amorphous silicon film using Joule heating was attempted in this study. An electric field is applied to a conductive layer, underneath, or, above, a silicon film to induce Joule heating to generate intense heat in order to carry out crystallization of amorphous silicon. Power density was more than 1,000 watt/cm2 and heating rate was higher than 100,000°C/sec under typical conditions of the experiments. Crystallization was accomplished uniformly throughout the sample within a few tens of milliseconds of the heating demonstrating a possibility of a new crystallization route of amorphous silicon films.

In Joule-heating induced crystallization, phase transformation can occur through solid-to-solid or liquid-to-solid phases, according to the input conditions of the pulsed power. It was observed that during a Joule-heating period of several tens of microseconds, randomly nucleated liquid seeds followed by rapid solidification in an amorphous matrix play an important role, especially for liquid-to-solid transformation. Meanwhile, under high-power input processing conditions, supergrains of greater than 5 μm in size were produced by lateral growth from the initial seeds without artificial control.

For large area flexible active matrix organic light emitting diode AMOLED display, we have developed a novel lift off method. This novel technology named as Joule heating induced lift‐off JILO uses pulsed electric field for debonding of plastic and the substrate glass. We fabricated the low temperature poly silicon LTPS thin film transistors TFTs on the plastic film. Applying JILO, we can successfully develop flexible TFTs with no damage on transistor performance