Preparation Of ITO Transparent Conductive Film By Magnetron Sputtering At Low Temperature

Indium tin oxide (ITO), which is a kind of wide band gap and highly doped n-type semiconductor, is widely used as transparent electrode of various display screen. Most researchers focus on the preparation of polycrystalline ITO thin films with the substrate temperature at 200⁴00℃, to study the process and optimize their optical and electrical properties. However, for portable display applications, the substrate can not be high temperature, but only be deposited ITO films at low temperatures, so in this paper, RF and DC magnetron sputtering methods were used to prepare ITO transparent conductive films on the ordinary glass slide and organic material polyethylene terephthalate (polyethylene terephthalate, PET), with high purity (99.99%) of the ITO ceramic target (wt.90% In₂O₃ + wt.10% SnO₂) targets.In this paper, the conditions of ITO thin films, deposited at low temperature, were explored. Thin films were measured by UV-visible spectrophotometer, four-point probe and X-ray diffraction, respectively.1,ITO films were prepared by RF sputtering on glass substrates, different processing conditions on the optical and electrical properties are discussed in detail. Optimal conditions obtained by experiment is the substrate temperature 110℃, the partial pressure of oxygen 6‰, sputtering power 60W, working pressure 0.2Pa, target substrate distance 50mm. Under the optimal conditions the result is the transmittance 80.27%, surface resistance 35Ω/□.2,The selected optimal conditions in the above experiment, ITO films were prepared by RF sputtering on organic PET substrate coated ITO film. The result is an average transmittance of 77.83% and sheet resistance 36Ω/□.3,ITO films prepared by DC magnetron sputtering and RF magnetron sputtering at low temperature were compared, the results show that for ITO films prepared by magnetron sputtering, both in control conditions, or from film on the degree of difficulty Optical and electrical properties, the RF magnetron sputtering method is superior to DC magnetron sputtering.4,A simple method of measuring film thickness is applied to ITO film thickness measurement, and measurement results were compared with that by a probe profiler. The results show that measurement of the thickness of the method is simple, the error is several tens of nanometers.In summary, in this paper, ITO thin films were prepared by RF magnetron sputtering method at low temperature, high-quality film is obtained as 80.27% transmittance and surface resistance of 35Ω/□. And try on flexible substrates in the coating, only the initial success, the results of an average transmittance of 77.83% and surface resistance 36Ω/□.