Effect of Post Deposition Annealing Treatments on Properties of AZO Thin Films for Schottky Diode Applications.

Abstract

High-quality aluminum (Al) doped ZnO (AZO) thin films were deposited on silicon substrates by RF sputtering at room temperature. The deposited films were annealed from the temperatures 350 °C to 650 °C in pure nitrogen (N₂) ambient. The effects of annealing on the microstructural, optical and electrical properties of the AZO films were investigated. A detailed analysis by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Four Probe and Hall measurements was performed to study the properties of these AZO thin films. It was observed that all of the as-deposited and annealed AZO films have homogenous surfaces and hexagonal wurtzite structures with good crystalline quality. The study also suggested that there was an intermediate post annealing temperature (450 °C) at which the deposited ZnO film exhibit best surface characteristics. Pd/AZO Schottky devices were fabricated with 450 °C annealed AZO thin films and the parameters of Schottky devices were extracted from I-V characteristics. These results indicated that the Pd/AZO films were very much suitable for various optoelectronics applications particularly for metal semiconductor metal based UV detector application.