Axelevitch Alexander
Engineering Faculty, Holon Institute of Technology (HIT), Holon 5810201, Israel.
Materials (Basel). 2021 Mar 3;14(5):1186. doi: 10.3390/ma14051186.
Transparent conductive oxide (TCO) thin films represent a large class of wide-bandgap semiconductors applied in all fields of micro- and optoelectronics. The most widespread material applied for the creation of TCO coatings is indium-tin oxide (ITO). At the same time, there are plurality trends to change the high-cost ITO on other materials, for example, on the ZnO doped by different elements such as Al, Mn, and Sb. These films require mobile and low-cost evaluation methods. The dynamic hot-probe measurement system is one of such techniques that can supplement and sometimes replace existing heavy systems such as the Hall effect measurements or the Haynes-Shockley experiments. The theoretical basis and the method of analysis of the recorded dynamic hot-probe characteristics measured at different temperatures were presented in this work. This method makes it possible to extract the main parameters of thin films. Commercial thin ITO films and new transparent conducting ZnO:Al layers prepared by magnetron co-sputtering were studied by the proposed method. The measured parameters of commercial ITO films are in agreement with the presented and reference data. In addition, the parameters of ZnO:Al thin films such as the majority charge carriers type, concentration, and mobility were extracted from dynamic hot-probe characteristics. This method may be applied also to other wide-bandgap semiconductors.
透明导电氧化物（TCO）薄膜是一大类应用于微电子和光电子所有领域的宽带隙半导体。用于制备TCO涂层的最广泛使用的材料是氧化铟锡（ITO）。与此同时，存在多种趋势促使人们用其他材料替代高成本的ITO，例如用铝、锰和锑等不同元素掺杂的氧化锌。这些薄膜需要灵活且低成本的评估方法。动态热探针测量系统就是这样一种技术，它可以补充甚至有时替代现有的复杂系统，如霍尔效应测量或海恩斯 - 肖克利实验。本文介绍了在不同温度下测量记录的动态热探针特性的理论基础和分析方法。该方法能够提取薄膜的主要参数。通过该方法研究了商用薄ITO薄膜以及通过磁控共溅射制备的新型透明导电ZnO:Al层。商用ITO薄膜的测量参数与已发表的数据和参考数据一致。此外，从动态热探针特性中提取了ZnO:Al薄膜的参数，如多数载流子类型、浓度和迁移率。该方法也可应用于其他宽带隙半导体。
