Abstract
Indium tin oxide (ITO) thin films, used in many optoelectronic applications, are typically grown to a thickness of a maximum of a few hundred nanometres. In this work, the composition, microstructure and optical/electrical properties of thick ITO coatings deposited by radio frequency magnetron sputtering from a ceramic ITO target in an Ar/O2 gas mixture (total O2 flow of 1%) on unheated glass substrates are reported for the first time. In contrast to the commonly observed (200) or (400) preferential orientations in ITO thin films, the approximately 3.3 μm thick coatings display a (622) preferential orientation. The ITO coatings exhibit a purely nanocrystalline structure and show good electrical and optical properties, such as an electrical resistivity of 1.3 × 10−1 Ω·cm, optical transmittance at 550 nm of ~60% and optical band gap of 2.9 eV. The initial results presented here are expected to provide useful information for future studies on the synthesis of high-quality thick ITO coatings.
Highlights
Indium tin oxide (ITO) is one of the most widely used materials as a transparent conducting oxide and ITO thin films are used in many applications, such as flat-panel displays, touch screen panels, light emitting diodes, solar cells and electrochromic devices (“smart windows”) [1,2]
Several techniques have been applied for ITO deposition, direct current (DC) [12,13,14,15,16,17,18] and radio frequency (RF) [17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27] magnetron sputtering are the most attractive and used methods, since thin films with high quality can be produced on an industrial scale in well-established production facilities
We investigate the nanostructure and optical properties of ~3.3 μm thick ITO coatings synthesised onto unheated glass substrates by RF magnetron sputtering in an Ar/O2 gas mixture
Summary
Indium tin oxide (ITO) is one of the most widely used materials as a transparent conducting oxide and ITO thin films are used in many applications, such as flat-panel displays, touch screen panels, light emitting diodes, solar cells and electrochromic devices (“smart windows”) [1,2]. The properties of ITO films are dependent on various deposition parameters in magnetron sputtering, such as substrate temperature [16], target to substrate distance [27], power to the target [16,17,18,19], working gas pressure [16,19], oxygen flow/partial pressure during reactive deposition [14,15,16,17,18,19,25,26] and film thickness [13,14,16,23]. For several applications low processing temperatures are required, e.g., for low-cost and temperature-sensitive substrates, such as polymers [13,14], and for the deposition onto semiconductor thin films, where a change in properties may occur upon annealing [28]. Oxygen is regularly used as a reactive gas during sputtering from oxide targets [12,14,15,16,17,18,19,22,25,26]
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