A Study on Improvement of Optical/Electrical Properties of Indium-Tin-Oxide Thin Films Prepared by Sol-Gel Process 2019-01-0187

Indium-tin-oxide (ITO) is well known, transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) because of its optical and electrical properties make it suitable for applications in liquid crystal displays, solar cells, and touch screens, organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs), gas sensors and smart windows. The ITO thin films have been prepared by different techniques such as pulsed laser deposition, chemical vapor deposition and sol-gel process. For cost effectiveness ITO thin film preparation, the sol–gel method is the best technique as it offers lower processing time, high scalability, no vacuum requirements and easy doping level tuning with the flexibility to achieve the desired shape and size. However, in the case of the ITO thin film prepared by the sol-gel process, the optical/electrical characteristics such as the transmittance and conductivity are somewhat poor than those of ITO thin film produced by sputtering, and the organic solvents used on the sol-gel process are most harmful to the environment. These limitations need to be improved for industrial application and in this dissertation, a study on post-treatment and solvent for improvement of optical/electrical properties of ITO thin films prepared by sol-gel process study was conducted as follows. At first, the mechanism of Ar plasma post-treatment effect was identified to improve this effect, and low molecular weight polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) coating process was applied to maximize post-treatment effect. In addition, a fully aqueous sol-gel method was used for the preparation of simple, highly crystalline, conductive, and transparent ITO thin films.