Al Doped ZnO Thin Films; Preparation and Characterization

ZnO is a promising material suitable for variety of novel electronic applications including sensors, transistors, and solar cells. Intrinsic ZnO film has inferiority in terms of electronic properties, which has prompted researches and investigations on doped ZnO films in order to improve its electronic properties. In this work, aluminum (Al) doped ZnO (AZO) with various concentrations and undoped ZnO films were coated on glass substrates by a sol–gel spin coating technique. The samples were analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), Uv-Vis spectrometer and four point probe technique to investigate the structural, surface morphology, optical transmittance, and electronic properties of the thin films. The optical transmittances of these samples in the visible region are in the range of 85-95% and the SEM images showed the size of nanoparticles were decrease with doping. Also 2% Al doped ZnO thin films had a lowest resistivity of all the samples that prepared in this study.