Growth of Aluminum Doped Zinc Oxide Films on Polymer Substrates for Flexible Display Applications

Highly conductive and transparent aluminum doped ZnO thin films (AZO) films have been prepared by r.f. magnetron sputtering processes on poly carbonate (PC) and onto glass as reference. In addition, the electrical, optical properties of the films prepared at various sputtering powers were investigated. The XRD measurements revealed that all of the obtained films were polycrystalline with the hexagonal structure and had a preferred orientation with the c-axis perpendicular to the substrate. The ZnO:Al films were increasingly dark gray colored as the sputter power increased, resulting in the loss of transmittance. High quality films with the resistivity as low as $9.7{\times}10^{-4}\;{\Omega}-cm$ and transmittance over 90% have been obtained by suitably controlling the r.f. power.