Thin-film semiconductor device having pressure sensitive and non-sensitive regions

DETAILED DESCRIPTION Aiming to solve such problems of the related art, an object of the present invention is to provide, as a substitute for such a bulk-type semiconductor device, a thin-film semiconductor device comprising integrated thin-film transistors.
The thin-film semiconductor device according to the present invention comprises an insulating substrate such as a glass substrate, and element regions integrated and arranged on the substrate in the form of a matrix and each including of mutually connected electrode and thin-film transistor.
Each electrode senses a signal voltage applied from above the element region.
Meanwhile, the thin-film transistors are on/off-controlled in order and detect the signal voltages applied to the corresponding electrodes.
As a feature of the present invention, the element region includes a sensitive region and a non-sensitive region, and the surface level of the sensitive region where the major part of the electrode is formed is higher than that of the non-sensitive region where the corresponding thin-film transistor is formed.
In one embodiment of the present invention, the electrode itself is formed such that the surface level of the sensitive region is higher than that of the non-sensitive region.
In another embodiment of the present invention, a bottom-raising pad is embedded under the electrode such that the surface level of the sensitive region is higher than that of the non-sensitive region.
The pad may comprise a conductor which may have an isolated pattern and may be in an electrically floating state.
More specifically, the thin-film transistor may comprise a gate electrode and a semiconductor thin-film which are mutually laminated with the intervention of a gate insulating film, and a wiring pattern connected to the semiconductor thin-film with the intervention of an interlayer insulating film, and the pad may have the same lamination structure as that of the aforementioned thin-film transistor.
Further, the thin-film transistor may have a top-gate structure in which a gate electrode, a gate insulating film and a semiconductor thin-film are laminated in this order from the top