Annealing induced refinement on optical transmission and electrical resistivity of indium tin oxide

The effect of annealing condition on sputtered indium tin oxide （ITO） films on quartz with the thickness of 200 nm is characterized to show enhanced optical transparency and optimized electrical contact resistivity. The as-deposited grown ITO film exhibits only 65% and 80% transmittance at 532 and 632.8 nm, respectively. After annealing at 475 ℃ for 15 min, the ITO film is refined to show improved transmittance at shorter wavelength region. The transmittances of 88.1% at 532 nm and 90.4% at 632.8 nm can be obtained. The 325-nm transmittance of the post-annealed ITO film is greatly increased from 12.7% to 41.9%. Optimized electrical property can be obtained when annealing below 450 ℃, leading to a minimum sheet resistance of 26 Ω/square. Such an ITO film with enhanced ultraviolet （UV） transmittance has become an alternative candidate for applications in current UV photonic devices. The morphology and conductance of the as-deposited and annealed ITO films are determined by using an atomic force microscopy （AFM）, showing a great change on the uniformity distribution with finite improvement on the surface conductance of the ITO film after annealing.     

Luminescent-wavelength tailoring silicon-rich silicon nitride LED

Wavelength tunable photoluminescence （PL） of Si-rich silicon nitride （SRSN） film with buried Si nanocrystals （Si-ncs） grown by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition （PECVD） under Sill4 and NH3 environment is investigated. Intense broadband visible emissions tunable from blue to red can be obtained from the as-deposited SiNs thin films with increasing NH3 flow rate from 150 to 250 sccm and detuning the SiH4/NH3 flow ratio during deposition. To date, the normalized PL wavelength of SiNx films after anneal- ing could be detuned over the range of 385-675 nm by decreasing the NH3 flow rate, corresponding to an enlargement on Si-nc size from 1.5-2 to 4-5 nm. The PL linewidth is decreased with increasing ammonia flow rate due to the improved uniformity of Si-ncs under high NH3 flow rate condition. In addition, the PL intensity is monotonically increasing with the blue shift of PL wavelength due to the increasing density of small-size Si-ncs. The ITO/SiNx/p-Si/Al diode reveals highly resistive property with the turn-on voltage and power-voltage slope of only 20 V and 0.18 nW/V, respectively. The turn-on voltage can further reduce from 20 to 3.8 V by improving the carrier injection efficiency with p-type Si nano-rods.