Comparison with electrical and optical properties of zinc oxide films deposited on the glass and PET substrates

Transparent oxide films derivating from wide band-gap semiconductors have found wide applications in recent years. The zinc oxide has most attention because of its excellent optical and electrical properties compared with the ITO film. In this work, different kinds of substrates (the glass and PET) were used to deposit zinc oxide films by RF magnetron sputtering. The structural, electrical and optical properties were studied using glass and PET substrates. The experimental results show that the films have proud (002) orientation on both substrates. The lowest resistivity obtained is 2.9 × 10− 3 Ω cm and 4.0 × 10− 3 Ω cm when the substrate is glass and PET respectively. The average transmittance in the visible spectrum can be above 80% no matter what kind of substrate was used. The results imply that the PET is as good as the glass and open a new field of low cost, lightweight, flexible process to produce unbreakable large area optoelectronic devices.