Study on Preparation and Application Performance of P-Type Conducting SnO2 Ceramic Target

Abstract

To obtain high quality SnO2 film, high conductivity and high quality SnO2 target should be obtained first. In this paper, high-conductivity Sb: SnO2 (ATO) ceramic targets were fabricated using SnO2, Sb2O3 powder as raw material. The chemical composition and morphology of SnO2 targets were characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscope (SEM) and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). The effect of different forming pressure on the morphology and electrical properties of targets were studied in our paper. The results show that molding pressure has a significant impact on the density of ATO targets and performance during sintering process. When molding pressure is 15 Mpa, the target has the minimum resistivity for 2.38 Ωcm. XRD results show that ATO target possess tetragonal rutile structure with the preferred orientation of (101). XPS indicate that the chemical state of Sn element in the target is Sn4+ and that of Sb is Sb3+. In addition, the shrinkage rate of conductive SnO2 target is 10.34% so that target can be used to sputtering in the magnetron sputter. The preparation process is simple and cost of SnO2 target is low. The transparent conductive SnO2 thin film was successfully deposited on glass substrate with good performance of high hole concentration and low resistivity of 3.334×1019 cm-3 and 3.588 Ω·cm, respectively. The average transmission of p-type SnO2 films was above 80% in the visible light range.