Effects of Rapid Thermal Process on the Microstructural, Electrical and Optical Properties of AZO Thin Films

Abstract

In this paper, Al-doped ZnO thin films were deposited on glass substrates by RF magnetron sputtering and subsequently rapid thermal processing was executed under temperature range from 300°C to 600°C in order to investigate the microstructure, electrical, and optical properties of AZO films. XRD and AFM microscopy results showed that all the samples were of poly-crystalline and the grain size became larger with the increasing processing temperature. Compared with the sample as-deposited, it was shown that resistivity decreased from 1.9×10-2 to 1.48×10-3Ωcm and carrier concentration increased from 1.48×1020 to 5.59×1020 cm3 when the sample was processed at 600°C in pure nitrogen for 1 min. The highest transmittance of the samples processed at 500°C improves to 90.35% compared with the as-deposited films (68.2% ) as the wavelength varied between 400 and 900 nm.