Active matrix liquid crystal displays and methods of manufacturing such

A method for use in the fabrication of active plates for pixellated devices, such as active matrix liquid crystal displays, having pixel electrodes (38) and associated address lines (32) formed from a layer of transparent conductive material (53) through which the conductivity of the address lines is improved. The transparent conductive layer (53) and a metal layer (54) are deposited in succession and followed by a shielding layer (60), e.g. of photoresist, which is patterned into a configuration of regions (67, 68, 69) corresponding to the required pixel electrodes and address lines with an etching property of the shielding layer at these respective regions being different. This enables the regions of this shielding layer corresponding to the pixel electrodes to be selectively etched away, thereby allowing the metal at these regions to be selectively removed while leaving metal at the address lines. The method simplifies the production of low mask mount TFT active plates with improved address line conductivity

Method of increasing the conductivity of a transparent conductive layer

A method of increasing the conductivity of a transparent conductive layer, in which a photoresist layer which patterns the transparent layer is given tapered edges and is partially etched. The partial etching exposing the edge regions of the underlying transparent conductor layer, which are the selectively plated. This method has a single patterning stage of the transparent layer, but uses partial etching of a tapered resist layer in order to expose a small edge region of the transparent layer for coating with a conductive layer (which can be opaque)

Tft electronic devices and their manufacture

An electronic device (70) comprises a thin film transistor (TFT) (9,59), the TFT including a channel (16) defined in a layer of polycrystalline semiconductor material (10,48). The polycrystalline semiconductor material is produced by crystallising amorphous semiconductor material (2) using metal atoms (6) to promote the crystallisation process. The polycrystalline semiconductor material (10) includes an average concentration of metal atoms in the range 1.3x1018 to 7.5x1018 atoms/cm3. This enables polycrystalline semiconductor TFTs to be formed with leakage properties acceptable for use in active matrix displays using a metal induced crystallisation process of duration significantly less that previously thought necessary. Furthermore, this process duration reduction facilitates the reliable fabrication of poly-Si TFTs having bottom gates formed of metal

A photodiode for detection within molecular diagnostics

A photodiode (200), for instance a PN or a PIN photodiode, is disclosed. The photodiode receives incident radiation having first and second spectral distributions, where the first spectral distribution is spectrally shifted from the second spectral distribution. The photodiode has a first semiconductor layer (211) capable of absorbing incident radiation (231) having a first spectral distribution without generating a photocurrent, while simultaneously transmitting incident radiation having a second spectral distribution to the intrinsic layer (212) for generating a photocurrent (213). The photodiode may be used in connection with detecting the presence of target molecules that has been labeled with labeling agents, such as fluorophores or quantum dots. The labeling agents are characterized by the Stokes shift and, therefore, they emit fluorescent radiation having the second spectral distribution that is spectrally shifted from the illumination radiation having the first spectral distribution