ABSTRACT
High-quality aluminum (Al) doped ZnO (AZO) thin films were deposited on silicon substrates by RF sputtering at room temperature. The deposited films were annealed from the temperatures 350 °C to 650 °C in pure nitrogen (N2) ambient. The effects of annealing on the microstructural, optical and electrical properties of the AZO films were investigated. A detailed analysis by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Four Probe and Hall measurements was performed to study the properties of these AZO thin films. It was observed that all of the as-deposited and annealed AZO films have homogenous surfaces and hexagonal wurtzite structures with good crystalline quality. The study also suggested that there was an intermediate post annealing temperature (450 °C) at which the deposited ZnO film exhibit best surface characteristics. Pd/AZO Schottky devices were fabricated with 450 °C annealed AZO thin films and the parameters of Schottky devices were extracted from I-V characteristics. These results indicated that the Pd/AZO films were very much suitable for various optoelectronics applications particularly for metal semiconductor metal based UV detector application.
ABSTRACT
The paper presents the results of our experimental investigation pertaining to tailoring of energy bandgap and other associated characteristics of undoped and Al doped ZnO (AZO) thin film by varying the atomic concentration of Al in ZnO. Thin films of ZnO and ZnO doped with Al (1, 3, and 5 atomic percent (at.%)) were deposited on silicon substrate for structural characterization and on glass substrate for optical characterization. The dependence of structural and optical properties of Al doped ZnO on the atomic concentration of Al added to ZnO has been reported. On the basis of the experimental results an empirical formula has been proposed to calculate the energy bandgap of AZO theoretically in the range of 1 to 5 at.% of Al. The study revealed that AZO films are composed of smaller and larger number of grains as compared to pure ZnO counterpart and density of the grains was found to increase as the Al concentration increased (from 1 to 5 at.%). The transmittance in the visible region was greater than 90% and found to increase with increasing Al concentration up to 5 at.%. The optical bandgap was found to increase initially with increase in atomic concentration of Al concentration up to 3 at.% and decrease thereafter with increasing concentration of Al.
ABSTRACT
ZnO based bottom-gate thin film transistor (TFT) with SiO2 as insulating layer has been fabricated with two different structures. The effect of formation of mesa structure on the electrical characteristics of the TFTs has been studied. The formation of mesa structure of ZnO channel region can definitely result in better control over channel region and enhance value of channel mobility of ZnO TFT. As a result, by fabricating a mesa structured TFT, a better value of mobility and on-state current are achieved at low voltages. A typical saturation current of 1.85 x 10(-7) A under a gate bias of 50 V is obtained for non mesa structure TFT while for mesa structured TFT saturation current of 5 x 10(-5) A can be obtained at comparatively very low gate bias of 6.4 V.
ABSTRACT
We report the performance of the thin film transistors (TFTs) using ZnO as an active channel layer grown by radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering technique. The bottom gate type TFT, consists of a conventional thermally grown SiO2 as gate insulator onto p-type Si substrates. The X-ray diffraction patterns reveal that the ZnO films are preferentially orientated in the (002) plane, with the c-axis perpendicular to the substrate. A typical ZnO TFT fabricated by this method exhibits saturation field effect mobility of about 0.6134 cm2/V s, an on to off ratio of 102, an off current of 2.0 x 10(-7) A, and a threshold voltage of 3.1 V at room temperature. Simulation of this TFT is also carried out by using the commercial software modeling tool ATLAS from Silvaco-International. The simulated global characteristics of the device were compared and contrasted with those measured experimentally. The experimental results are in fairly good agreement with those obtained from simulation.
