A Comparative Study on the Microstructure and Properties of ITO Targets and Thin Films Prepared from Two Different Powde
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A Comparative Study on the Microstructure and Properties of ITO Targets and Thin Films Prepared from Two Different Powders Fangsheng Mei1,2 · Tiechui Yuan1,2 · Ruidi Li1 · Jingwei Huang1 Received: 22 April 2020 / Revised: 29 May 2020 / Accepted: 10 June 2020 © The Chinese Society for Metals (CSM) and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract With the rapid development of indium tin oxide (ITO) in the electronic display industry, choosing which raw powders to prepare high-quality ITO targets has always been a controversial topic. In the work, in order to clearly understand the effect of the raw powders on the microstructure and properties of ITO targets and thin films, tin-doped indium oxide (dITO) and In2O3-SnO2 mixed (mITO) powders were chosen to prepare ITO targets for depositing the films and a comparative study on their microstructure and properties was conducted. It is found that, (1) dITO targets possess a higher solid solubility of tin in indium oxide and more uniform elemental distribution, while there are a higher density, a finer grain size and a higher mass ratio of In2O3 to SnO2 for the mITO targets; (2) dITO films with more coarser columnar grains and a rougher surface prefer to grow along the [100] direction in an Ar atmosphere; (3) the conductive property of ITO films only depends on the doping amount of tin and is independent of the raw powders and the preparation process of the target source; (4) dITO films possess the superior optical property and narrower optical band gap; (5) the etching property of mITO films is superior to that of dITO films due to the lower solid solubility of tin in indium oxide. Keywords Tin-doped indium oxide · In2O3-SnO2 mixed powder · Solid solubility of tin in indium oxide · Photoelectric property · Etching property
1 Introduction Indium tin oxide (ITO) film deposited on the glass and flexible polymer substrate, which is usually used as the transparent electrode, has been widely used in the electronic industry, such as liquid crystal display (LCD), touch panel (TP), electroluminescent (EL), light emitting diode (LED), thin film solar cell [1–5]. The numerous methods were adopted to prepare ITO films, such as the reactive sputtering method using Available online at http://link.springer.com/journal/40195. * Fangsheng Mei [email protected] * Tiechui Yuan [email protected] 1
Powder Metallurgy Research Institute, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
Science and Technology on High Strength Structural Materials Laboratory, Central South University, Changsha 410083, China
2
indium–tin alloys [6, 7], evaporation method [7], direct current (DC) or radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering method [8], sol–gel method [9, 10] and so on. Among these methods, the DC magnetron sputtering using ITO targets is the most common method to deposit ITO films because it is controllable for the sputtering conditions and suitable for the large area deposition [1, 6–11]. After decades of highspeed development, many process methods were
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