Abstract
High-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) was used to deposit ITO/Ag/ITO (IAgI) and ITO/Cu/ITO (ICuI) sandwiched films on polyethylene naphthalate substrate at room temperature as flexible transparent conductive materials. The hybrid layers were constructed with 40 nm ITO bottom and top layers, and a 5–20 nm Ag or Cu interlayer. The microstructure and optoelectrical properties were estimated for these films with various thicknesses of the metal interlayer. Thanks to the high-power density and highly ionized plasma in the HiPIMS process, the IAgI and ICuI sandwich structures exhibited good crystallinity and smooth surfaces with high optical transmittance and low sheet resistance. The optimal figure of merit was obtained as 101.16 × 10−3·Ω−1 for the IAgI film and 4.83 × 10−3·Ω−1 for the ICuI film with the metal interlayer thickness of 10 nm, both of which are higher than that from a similar structure reported via sputtering at room temperature. These results indicate that HiPIMS is a promising technique to deposit transparent conductive films onto soft substrates for applications in flexible optoelectronic devices.
Highlights
The development of flexible optoelectronic devices, such as photovoltaic solar cells, thin-film transistors, touch screen panels and organic light-emitting diodes, demands high quality transparent conductive oxides (TCO) available on large scale polymer substrates [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]
Low-temperature annealing [33], refractive index-matching layers [34,35] and buffer layers [36] have been adopted to improve the performance of the TCO films deposited on polymer substrates, which inevitably complicates the manufacturing process and increases cost
The triple-layer structure films were obtained by depositing Indium-tin oxide (ITO) and thin metal layers sequentially in the High-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) system, in which every combination of each thickness was adopted to determine the optimum condition; 150 Hz frequency, 100 μs pulse-on time and 1.0 kW average power were employed for the ITO deposition
Summary
The development of flexible optoelectronic devices, such as photovoltaic solar cells, thin-film transistors, touch screen panels and organic light-emitting diodes, demands high quality transparent conductive oxides (TCO) available on large scale polymer substrates [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. RF/DC magnetron sputtering was applied to deposit TCO films on polymer substrates at room temperature with low power density. Low-temperature annealing [33], refractive index-matching layers [34,35] and buffer layers [36] have been adopted to improve the performance of the TCO films deposited on polymer substrates, which inevitably complicates the manufacturing process and increases cost. All magnetron sputtered TCO films are deposited at a low power density of a few. The high-power impulse magnetron sputtering (HiPIMS) technique has been employed to deposit films on polymer substrates [40,41,42]. The metal-inserted sandwich structures with large figures of merit (ΦTC ) were obtained on flexible TCO films with higher transmittance and lower sheet resistance
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