Electrical properties of evaporated polycrystalline Ge thin-films

Low-temperature growth of polycrystalline Ge thin film on glass by in situ deposition and ex situ solid-phase crystallization for photovoltaic applications

“…Finally, the preferential orientation changes from (2 2 0) to (1 1 1) with the further increase of T s to 450 8C. The trend was in good agreement with the results reported in reference [3,4,6] except the T s of 450 8C in our work was much lower than 600 8C reported in the literature [6]. Based on the strong (1 1 1) preferential orientation observed, the film as-sputtered at 450 8C is thought to be poly-crystalline according to Ref.…”

“…This point of view is supported by the extremely strong dominant (1 1 1) peak orientation observed in reference [19], where Ge films having >1 mm grain size were reported and also by experiments in reference [20]. The pronounced (1 1 1) orientation of our Ge thin films prepared by PVD is comparable to RF sputtered films on glass deposited at 600 8C with a similar thickness [6] or evaporated 400 nm thick Ge films on Si 3 N 4 CVDcoated Si substrate at 400 8C followed by annealing at 900 8C [4].…”

“…To reduce the cost of the material required, poly-crystalline Ge (polyGe) thin films have attracted research interest in recent years. A number of techniques based on physical vapor deposition (PVD) including evaporation [3][4][5], radio-frequency (RF) sputtering [6], sputtering combined with aluminum-induced crystallization [7], sputtering combined with laser crystallization [8,9], and others have been investigated. However, with most of these approaches the film quality reported was poor unless either high substrate temperature (T s ) or an ex situ crystallization process was used.…”

Influence of hydrogen on structural and optical properties of low temperature polycrystalline Ge films deposited by RF magnetron sputtering

“…Consequently, the preferential orientation changes from (2 2 0) to (1 1 1). This trend is in good agreement with others [20,30,31] except that in the case T s ¼450 1C our film has (1 1 1) preferential orientation while that of the film with a similar thickness reported in Ref. [20] was dominated by the (2 2 0) orientation up to 600 1C.…”

Optical and structural characterisation of single and multilayer germanium/silicon monoxide systems

“…On the contrary, sample 7 (grown at 370 -C) shows a pattern with three sharp peaks at angles 2h equal to 25.86-, 45.46-and 53.80-, which correspond to the Bragg planes (111), (220) and (331), respectively, as indicated in the figure. The most intense peak corresponds to the (220) planes, in agreement with the results reported by other authors [22,23] for germanium thin films grown at similar substrate temperatures.…”