Improved Nanoscale Al-Doped ZnO with a ZnO Buffer Layer Fabricated by Nitrogen-Mediated Crystallization for Flexible Optoelectronic Devices

Abstract

To achieve excellent semiconductor device performance, especially for low-temperature processing of semiconductors, the need to devise strategies to engineer the surface and interface and to develop characterization techniques to understand the cause-effect relationship of surface and interface of semiconductor devices remains to be a key issue. Here, we present a nucleation control method, termed nitrogen-mediated crystallization (NMC), to engineer the surface morphology of a ZnO buffer layer and analyze first- and second-degree statistical surfaces to reveal the morphological relationship between the buffer layer and the buffered AZO film. The surface parameter is generally understood as the surface roughness (roughness average or RMS roughness) or the surface height profile, and our experimental results suggest that the physical properties of the buffered AZO films are strongly influenced by the uniformity of the fractal geometry of the buffer layers and are insensitive to their surface roughness. We d...