Thin-film transistor

This differs from the conventional bulk metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), where the semiconductor material typically is the substrate, such as a silicon wafer.

[19] The Portuguese laboratory CENIMAT at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa has produced the world's first completely transparent TFT at room temperature.

[20] CENIMAT also developed the first paper transistor,[21] which may lead to applications such as magazines and journal pages with moving images.

A TFT is used in both direct and indirect capture[jargon] as a base for the image receptor in medical radiography.

[27] AMOLED displays also contain a TFT layer for active-matrix pixel addressing of individual organic light-emitting diodes.

This picture does not include the actual light-source (usually cold-cathode fluorescent lamps or white LEDs), just the TFT-display matrix.

In February 1957, John Wallmark of RCA filed a patent for a thin film MOSFET in which germanium monoxide was used as a gate dielectric.

Kunig at Westinghouse Electric fabricated indium arsenide (InAs) MOS TFTs in both depletion and enhancement modes.

[28][29][30][31][32][33] The idea of a TFT-based liquid-crystal display (LCD) was conceived by Bernard J. Lechner of RCA Laboratories in 1968.

Nester and J. Tults demonstrated the concept in 1968 with an 18x2 matrix dynamic scattering LCD that used standard discrete MOSFETs, as TFT performance was not adequate at the time.

They reported the first functional TFT made from hydrogenated a-Si with a silicon nitride gate dielectric layer.

[44] In 1986, a Hitachi research team led by Akio Mimura demonstrated a low-temperature polycrystalline silicon (LTPS) process for fabricating n-channel TFTs on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI), at a relatively low temperature of 200 °C.

[31] In 1988, a Sharp research team led by engineer T. Nagayasu used hydrogenated a-Si TFTs to demonstrate a 14-inch full-color LCD display,[34][48] which convinced the electronics industry that LCD would eventually replace cathode-ray tube (CRT) as the standard television display technology.