Investigation of Electrical Characterization of Hetero-Junctions Formed by RF Sputtered Indium Tin Oxide on Silicon

Abstract

Certain oxide semiconductors show promise as wide-scale use in optical applications owing to their low electrical resistivity and high optical transparency. One such oxide taken into our consideration here is Indium Tin Oxide (ITO). ITO is one of the most commonly used transparent conducting oxides owing to its good optical transparency and low electrical resistivity. It is also relatively easy to deposit as thin films. When deposited upon silicon, Indium and tin oxide forms good hetero-junction photovoltaic cells.In this work, we study the electrical properties of ITO-Si hetero-junctions prepared under various deposition parameters. For this investigation, we fabricate ITO-Si hetero-junctions by RF sputtering of ITO (90% In2O3 and 10% SnO2) target. Interestingly, ITO-Si hetero-junctions can be formed on both n- and p- type Si. The studies are performed on both hetero-junction devices of ITO sputtered on n- and p- type Si wafers and characterized.REFERENCES[1] J.B. DuBow, D.E. Burk, and J.R. Sites, “Efficient photovoltaic heterojunctions of indium tin oxide on silicon” Applied Physics Letters 29, 494 (1976)[2] Tiberiu Mizrah and David Adler, “Indium-Tin Oxide-Silicon Heterojunction Photovoltaic Devices” IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Vol. ED-24, No. 4, April 1977[3] J. Shewchun, D. Burk, R. Singh, M. Spitzer, and J. Dubow “The semiconductor-insulator-semiconductor (indium tin oxide on silicon) solar cell: Characteristics and loss mechanisms” Journal of Applied Physics 50, 6524 (1979)[4] H. Kobayashi, T. Ishida, K. Nakamura, Y. Nakato and H. Tsubomura, “Properties of indium tin oxide films prepared by electron beam evaporation method in relation to characteristics of indium tin oxide/silicon oxide/silicon junction solar cells” Journal of Applied Physics 72, 5288 (1992)