Highly conductive and transparent Ti-doped zinc oxide thin films

The properties of ZnO thin film are currently of great commercial and scientific interest due to its particular properties such as highly conductive, transparent as well as chemical stability and nontoxic. The Ti doping ZnO thin films were deposited by simultaneously magnetron co-sputtering from both Zn and Ti targets in a mixture of oxygen and argon gases onto heated Corning 7059 glass substrates in this study. The experimental results show that deposition rate of ZnO films are strongly dependent on DC power of Ti target The growth rate initially increases and changes to decrease when the DC power of Ti target further rises. The content of Ti in the ZnO films increases with the applied DC power of Ti target. The lattice constant of ZnO (002) increases with DC power of Ti target due to incorporated Ti into the lattice of ZnO. The crystalline size becomes smaller when the DC power of Ti target was raised. The visible transmittance is a little lowered when slight Ti incorporated but still average maintains above 80%. The lowest resistivity of undoped ZnO film obtained in this study is 4.14x10(-3) ohm-cm and further decreased to 1.02x10(-3) ohm-cm after being doped a trace of Ti.