Epitaxial growth of Tin Oxide thin films deposited by powder sputtering method

Tin Oxide (SnO2) has been widely investigated as a transparent conducting oxide (TCO) and can be used in optoelectronic devices such as solar cell and flat-panel displays. In addition, it would be applicable to fabricating the wide bandgap semiconductor because of its bandgap of 3.6 eV. There have been concentrated on the improvement of optical properties, such as conductivity and transparency, by doping Indium Oxide and Gallium Oxide. Recently, with development of fabrication techniques, high-qulaity SnO2 epitaxial thin films have been studied and received much attention to produce the electronic devices such as sensor and light-emitting diode. In this study, powder sputtering method was employed to deposit epitaxial thin films on sapphire (0001) substrates. A commercial SnO2 powder was sputtered. The samples were prepared with varying the growth parameters such as gas environment and film thickness. Then, the samples were characterized by using XRD, SEM, AFM, and Raman spectroscopy measurements. The details of physical properties of epitaxial SnO2 thin films will be presented.