Effect of vacuum annealing on the optical and electrical properties of sputtered silicon doped indium oxide thin films

Abstract Silicon doped indium oxide (SIO) thin-films were deposited on Corning glass substrates using radio frequency magnetron sputtering at room temperature. The deposited SIO thin-films were post annealed under vacuum conditions (∼3.9 × 10−4 Pa) at 100–500 °C, respectively. The XRD analysis confirmed presence of polycrystalline indium oxide (In2O3) with preferred orientation in the (400) plane. Atomic force microscopy images show root mean square roughness ranging between ∼6 and 10 nm. The SIO thin-film post annealed at 400 °C had shown the electrical resistivity, mobility carrier concentration and sheet resistance values of 3.7 × 10−4 Ω-cm, 40 cm2/V.s, 4.2 × 1020 cm−3 and 4.96 Ω/□, respectively. The average transmittance of 76.2%, in the visible region (380–750 nm) was observed for SIO thin-film post annealed at 400 °C. The obtained results confirm that SIO thin films can be used for further development of high-performance transparent electrodes by sputtering technique.