Low-Temperature Naturatron Sputtering System for Deposition of Indium Tin Oxide Film

Abstract

In this paper, we have newly developed a metal thin film-forming sputtering system using the Naturatron Sputtering method that can prevent the plastic film from suffering damage caused by the high-energy particles in plasma and carry out the low-temperature high-density metal deposition with a sputtering chamber and a film deposition chamber separated from each other. This system has made it possible to deposit the indium tin oxide (ITO) thin film on the poly(ethylene naphthalate) film as a substrate. As a result of energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy analysis or scanning electron microscope analysis performed for the ITO thin film, it has been proven that the uniform-surface ITO thin film can be deposited on a plastic film.Index Terms-Argon + oxygen mixture gas, indium tin films, Naturatron Sputtering method, poly(ethylene naphthalate) (PEN) film, solar cell. I. INTRODUCTIONI N THE recent solar cell industry, the customer and user take notice of a flexible solar cell that has the advantage of being able to make the area larger and the cost lower by introducing the effective using method and lightweighting measures into the solar cell designed as the curved-surfaced structure with flexible shape [1]- [5]. The currently proposed flexible solar cells provide generally the production process that the metal thin film is deposited on the rolled plastic film on roll-to-roll processing technologies [9] using the plasma chemical vapor deposition (CVD) system [6]-[8] with the plastic film used as a substrate, but improving in the defective metal thin-film deposition and shortening of the film deposition time are viewed as Manuscript

Surface chemical structure of poly(ethylene naphthalate) films during degradation in low-pressure high-frequency plasma treatments

“…In addition, by this process, organic contaminants can be removed from the surface and the surface can be controllably modified such as changing the chemical functional groups on the surface. [5][6][7] From the experimental results of these authors thus far, it has been clarified that, in the gas mixture of Ar + O 2 in the vacuum chamber, the electrons and oxygen radicals generated in the plasma temporarily adhere to the poly(ethylene naphthalate) (PEN) film surface and cause chemical reaction on the surface to improve hydrophilicity. [8][9][10] Thus, plasma surface treatment is a useful technique for enhancing the adhesive properties in the cluster manufacturing industry of flexible solar cells.…”