Microstructure of indium-tin-oxide films deposited on glass substrates

Transparent conducting oxides are materials with high transparency in a part of the light spectrum and high electrical conductivity. They are of special interest in applications like solar cells and microsystem technology. Indium-tin-oxide (ITO) belongs to the transparent conducting oxides and has also a number of other key characteristics. Microstructure of the ITO films more often than not influences their main properties as transparency and electrical conductivity. In this paper, the microstructure of the ITO films deposited on glass by a diode sputtering technique is investigated. X-ray powder diffraction analysis was used. According to the X-ray analysis, the investigated ITO films are polycrystalline with a strong preferred orientation of crystallites in [111] direction perpendicular to the substrate, they consist of two sublayers with a different disorder of the crystallites and different microstrains and dimensions of the crystallites.