High-Quality AZO/Au/AZO Sandwich Film with Ultralow Optical Loss and Resistivity for Transparent Flexible Electrodes

Abstract

Transparent flexible electrodes are in ever-growing demand for modern stretchable optoelectronic devices, such as display technologies, solar cells, and smart windows. Such sandwich-film-electrodes deposited on polymer substrates are unattainable because of the low quality of the films, inducing a relatively large optical loss and resistivity as well as a difficulty in elucidating the interference behavior of light. In this article, we report a high-quality AZO/Au/AZO sandwich film with excellent optoelectronic performance, e.g., an average transmittance of about 81.7% (including the substrate contribution) over the visible range, a sheet resistance of 5 Ω/sq, and a figure-of-merit (FoM) factor of ∼55.1. These values are well ahead of those previously reported for sandwich-film-electrodes. Additionally, the interference behaviors of light modulated by the coat and metal layers have been explored with the employment of transmittance spectra and numerical simulations. In particular, a heater device based on an AZO/Au/AZO sandwich film exhibits high performance such as short response time (∼5 s) and uniform temperature field. This work provides a deep insight into the improvement of the film quality of the sandwich electrodes and the design of high-performance transparent flexible devices by the application of a flexible substrate with an atomically smooth surface.

Tailored ZnS/Ag/TiOx transparent and conductive electrode for organic solar cells

“…The ZnS (40 nm)/Ag (10 nm)/TiO x (30 nm) TCE presents the best F value (23.10 À3 W À1 ). This high-level value is comparable to those of the current stateof-the-art [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Figure 6 shows the variation of the merit figure and of the sheet resistance as a function of TiO x thickness.…”

“…The opto-electrical performances of our electrodes are at the-state-of-the-art of this ETC field [26]. With a fairly large merit figure comparable to literature values [23,[27][28][29], such transparent, conductive three-layer electrodes are good candidates for use as indium-free electrode in organic solar cells.…”

A Review on Materials and Technologies for Organic Large‐Area Electronics

“…[ 66,73 ] Zhou et al have demonstrated AZO potential after they were able to develop a high‐quality transparent flexible electrode, by designing an AZO/Au/AZO multiple layer structure on a mica substrate. [ 80 ] This thin film (126 nm) exhibited high transmittance percentage (81.7%) and low resistivity.…”

Flexible Sensors—From Materials to Applications

“…For this end, materials with interesting properties for flexible electronics, such as AZO, have been developed. Zhou et al [81] demonstrated that an AZO/Au/AZO layer on mica exhibiting a sheet resistance of 5 Ω/ and a transparency close to 90% for a total layer thickness of 126 nm where the Au layer corresponded to 10 nm. This device withstood a 7 mm bending radius, but its sheet resistance increased to 9 Ω/ while bent to a smaller radius of 5 mm.…”