Properties of Aluminum Doped Zinc Oxide Thin Film Prepared by Sol-gel Process

Transparent conducting aluminum-doped ZnO thin films were deposited using a sol-gel process. In this study, the important deposition parameters were investigated thoroughly to determine the appropriate procedures to grow large area thin films with low resistivity and high transparency at low cost for device applications. The doping concentration of aluminum was adjusted in a range from 1 to 4 mol% by controlling the precursor concentration. The annealing temperatures for the pre-heat treatment and post-heat treatment was 250 degrees C and 400-600 degrees C, respectively. The SEM images show that Al doped and undoped ZnO films were quite uniform and compact. The XRD pattern shows that the Al doped ZnO film has poorer crystallinity than the undoped films. The crystal quality of Al doped ZnO films was improved with an increase of the annealing temperature to 600 degrees C. Although the structure of the aluminum doped ZnO films did not have a preferred orientation along the (002) plane, these films had high transmittance (> 87%) in the visible region. The absorption edge was observed at approximately 370 nm, and the absorption wavelength showed a blue-shift with increasing doping concentration. The ZnO films annealed at 500 degrees C showed the lowest resistivity at 1 mol% Al doping.