The High Rate Vacuum Deposition of Highly Conductive Transparent Oxides

Transparent Conducting Oxide (TCO) coatings play a crucial role in both photovoltaicand display technologies. In the latter technology TCO's provide a conductiveelectrode that is also transparent to the light emitted from the underlying displaywhile, in the former technology, TCO's allow light to pass through the electrode tothe underlying semiconductor that converts the light into electron-hole pairs.Despite the commercial need, the process control has been limited by the traditionalvacuum deposition method of reactive magnetron sputtering that is pretty muchstandard for TCO deposition in the industry. Sputtering is simple to implement and,in fact, generally produces higher quality TCO films than can be produced withtraditional evaporation methods, but it is a very slow deposition rate process.Plasma injection designs analogous to the HAD process will be tested as a baselinecondition. The ability to really drive the rate up is going to depend not just on thereactivity of the metal and oxygen species and available surface energy(i.e. the degree of ionization and radical density).It will also depend critically on the intimacy of the flux mixture as thecombined flux strikes the substrate. This will require designing both theplasma and metal sources to direct the flux in very specific ways.Transparent Conducting Oxide (TCO) coatings play a crucial role in both photovoltaicand display technologies. In the latter technology TCO's provide a conductiveelectrode that is also transparent to the light emitted from the underlying displaywhile, in the former technology, TCO's allow light to pass through the electrode tothe underlying semiconductor that converts the light into electron-hole pairs.TCO's are also very useful materials for fabrication of transparent, anti-static,packaging and