Numerical simulations of poly-crystalline silicon thin film transistors including leakage effects

The authors show good agreement between numerical simulations and experimental data of the electrical characteristics of poly-crystalline silicon (poly-Si) thin film transistors (TFTs). They focus on the field-effect mobility, threshold voltage, leakage current, and the so-called `kink´ effect. They demonstrate how the `on-state´ performance of these devices can be modeled by a uniform effective medium approach and show how their characteristics vary with fabrication process, which in turn determines the effective density of states (DOS) distribution. Leakage currents are modeled by adding a single grain boundary with a trap to band tunneling mechanism