Study on in-situ real-time measurement for thin film growth of organic semiconductors

Abstract

We propose an approach for in-situ real-time measuring the optical and electric properties of a thin film in parallel during the process of growth. The method is developed based on two techniques: differential reflectance spectroscopy (DRS) and field effect transistor (FET) structure based electrical characteristics testing method. In order to demonstrate the performance of the method, FETs with a bottom-gate structure are manufactured and the pentacene organic thin film is deposited by vacuum thermal evaporation as a transport layer on the top of the transistor, i.e. the insulator substrate of SiO2. The optical and electrical properties of the organic thin film are in-situ investigated during its growth. As obtained from the optical spectra, the DRS signal moves up and down along the wavelength. Its fluctuation amplitude increases quickly and is very sensitive to the variation of the thickness of the top most film since the shutter of the molecular evaporation source is open. A good agreement between the experimental data and the computational results with a four-layer structure model of Si/SiO2/pentacene/air suggests that the DRS signal here is mainly due to the interference that exists in the multilayer interfaces. In addition, there are two characteristic peaks at 629 nm (1.97 eV) and 673 nm (1.84 eV) appearing occurs clearly in the DRS spectra at the initial stage of the growth. It means that the pentacene layer forms a thin film phase structure. Furthermore, the growth rate is evaluated to be 0.23 nm/min. When the effective thickness of the pentacene layer reaches 28 nm, calculated from the growth rate and the measured time, the conductivity of the organic FET becomes noticeable. It implies that an electrical conducting layer is already formed. After that, the thickness of the conducting layer continuously increases, while the current between the drain and the source increases slowly and turns to be saturated. After a 15-hour film growth, the sample has a threshold voltage of -20 V and the charge carrier mobility is 3.1×10-3 cm2/(V· s). These data confirm that the sample is an FET although its electronic properties are not good enough. These results show that the proposed approach is a useful measurement tool to build the relationships among the data of the optical spectrum, the electrical property, and the structure of the thin films. Hence, it is valuable for both the explanation of the growth mechanism of the thin film in research and the optimization of its preparation process in industry.