| Budget Amount *help |
¥3,370,000 (Direct Cost: ¥3,100,000、Indirect Cost: ¥270,000)
Fiscal Year 2007: ¥1,170,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000、Indirect Cost: ¥270,000)
Fiscal Year 2006: ¥900,000 (Direct Cost: ¥900,000)
Fiscal Year 2005: ¥1,300,000 (Direct Cost: ¥1,300,000)
|
|---|
| Research Abstract |
Aluminum (Al) doped zinc oxide (ZnO) is a well known transparent conductive oxide and has a high technological impact due to its unique material properties such as low production cost and non-toxic nature. Thereby, the Al doped ZnO has been expected as one of the promising alternatives to indium tin oxide (ITO), which has long been widely used as transparent conductive electrodes of solar cells and flat panel displays but the use of costly and sparse indium (In) has recently been worried about. In order to put the Al doped ZnO to practical use in industry, however, both the understanding of its fundamental properties like electrical, optical, and micro-structural properties and the establishment of low cost and reproducible fabrication processes of Al doped ZnO thin films are essential.
To explore a high rate fabrication process of high quality Al doped ZnO thin films, we have employed inductively coupled plasma (ICP : 13.56MHz) to assist planar magnetron (PM) sputtering (3 inch, Al dop
… More
ed ZnO target). Obtained results are summarized as follows.
1) Superposition of high density ICP to the conventional planar magnetron makes it possible to decrease the target sputtering voltage while increasing target ion current at a fixed sputtering power ; in addition, target eroded area expands. Thus, film damage is decreased due to the decrease in average energy of particles impinging the substrate ; spatial uniformity of electrical and optical properties on the substrate is improved ; and the target usability is also improved.
2) Depending on the experimental condition, arcing frequently occurred on the Al doped ZnO target during the sputter-deposition process. The number of arcing event was found to decrease by the superposition of ICP.
3) Resistivity attained in this research is of the order of 10-3Ωcm, which is one order of magnitude higher than the top data ever reported. For the improvement of film quality, we need to pay more attention to the degradation of target, arcing generation, and impurity control. Less
|
