A comparative study of the effect of annealing and plasma treatments on the microstructure and properties of colloidal indium tin oxide films and cold-sputtered indium tin oxide films

Indium tin oxide (ITO) films were fabricated by (i) RF sputtering and (ii) spin coating of a colloidal ITO dispersion synthesized in-house. Films were deposited onto glass and quartz substrates and were annealed in air and in argon. The electrical properties of the films were studied as a function of annealing temperature and atmosphere. For the colloidal films, the effect of pre-annealing plasma treatments was also evaluated. Removal of the organic ligands from the colloidal films, in combination with annealing, resulted in over 8 orders of magnitude decrease in the film resistivity. It was found that plasma treatments were particularly effective in reducing film resistivity for low temperature annealed colloidal films. Results for the cold-sputtered films were for the most part as expected, with argon annealing resulting in lower resistivities than films annealed in air. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.