Deposit zinc oxide thin film at atmospheric pressure using dielectric barrier discharge.

Abstract

Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a widely applied material in industry and technically important due to its wide range of optical and electrical properties. Recent years different techniques have already been adopted to deposit it include chemical vapor deposition, plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PECVD), pulsed laser deposition, ion beam sputtering, magnetron sputtering, spray pyrolysis etc. In our lab DC arc plasmatron [10] has been designed and used for several purposes including ZnO deposition at atmospheric condition. The main objective of my experiment is to use dielectric barrier discharge to excite the ZnO vapor and observe the deposition occurred on the silicon substrates. Three different dielectric barrier discharge configurations have been developed to achieve deposition. In the experiment deposition of ZnO thin films on Silicon wafer has been done by using coaxial, parallel plate and disk plate type dielectric barrier discharge at atmospheric pressure. The deposition process depends on physical and chemical interactions in the plasma, frequency, power, gas pressure & composition, the magnitude and the pattern of the gas flow and electrode geometry. As electrode geometry has great impact on non-thermal plasma the main objective of the experiment is to apply different electrode configurations with different gaps & electrode geometry and observe the impact on ZnO deposition. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has been used to reveal the presence of ZnO on the substrate, FESEM for surface observation. Optical Emission spectroscopy has been used to determine different element & ion species present at the different environment which could affect the deposition.

Keywords: Dielectric barrier discharge, zinc oxide, silicon wafer, atmospheric pressure, silicon wafer, non-thermal plasma.