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Broad compositional range and post treatment of DC magnetron sputtered AZO films

Transparent conductive layers conduct electrical charge in efficient and stable manner while transmit light in the visible part of the spectrum. TCOs are broadly used in optoelectronics, particularly indium doped tin oxide (ITO), at a high production cost. Alternatively, zinc oxide (ZnO) n-type semiconductor can be Al doped (AZO) to improve its electrical properties. AZO films can be derived by various chemical and physical methods of deposition, for example by DC or RF magnetron sputtering commonly yielding uniform films with sufficient conductivity and transparency, with disadvantageous requirements for high vacuum and thermal post-processing MS grown AZO thin films greatly depend on the deposition parameters used during magnetron sputtering ; there is no consensus on how to prepare AZO films using MS. We investigated the films derived by DC MS (from two targets: ZnO and Al with individual power variation and subsequent thermal treatment) using various methods (GID, GISAXS, FEG-SEM, AFM, Raman, UV-VIS, contact angle, solid state impedance spectroscopy) It was shown, that for a deposition type, power and temperature play a crucial role on the resulting properties of prepared AZO films. We think that observed course of deposition and derivative parameters are the consequence of interplay of parameters, all of which are related with domain size. Each individual sample series can be described between extremes being: Al doped ZnO structure with inhomogeneous distribution of residual Al in the material at lower deposition powers and with more structurally disrupted ZnO with more homogeneous Al distribution facilitating better functionality.

TCO ; AZO thin-films ; magnetron sputtering ; solid state impedance spectroscopy ; AFM ; synchrotron GISAXS

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