We report on the formation of V2O5 semiconductor thin films using rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on sputter-deposited amorphous VOX. DC magnetron sputtering was used to obtain an initial amorphous VOx film on p-Si substrate, followed by O2- and N2-RTA ...
We report on the formation of V2O5 semiconductor thin films using rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on sputter-deposited amorphous VOX. DC magnetron sputtering was used to obtain an initial amorphous VOx film on p-Si substrate, followed by O2- and N2-RTA at two different temperatures of 400 and 500 oC for 3 min. According to X-ray diffraction results, O2-RTA is more effective to achieve the semiconducting phase, V2O5 than N2-RTA, which caused some electrically conducting phases such as V4O9 or V6O13 at 400oC. It is probably because O2 ambient easily supplies O atoms to VOx surface so that the oxide may become the most stable phase. We could postulate from a study of gas-surface interaction on vanadium oxide thin films that in the oxygen ambient the oxygen gas adsorptions on VOx could occur, so the formation of stable V2O5 could be achieved easily particularly at an elevated temperature. The surface microstructure of our VOx film clearly evolves to large-grained structure with the RTA temperature and the resulting rms roughness increases, showing 0.3, 1.2, and 1.5 nm for the cases of as-deposited, 400oC-N2-RTA, and 500oC-N2-RTA, respectively. Our results also show that O2-RTA increases the roughness rather than N2-RTA. In particular, our VOx sample, prepared through 500oC-O2-RTA and proved to be V2O5, appeared to have the most rough surface (Rms roughness= 3.6 nm). With the semiconducting phase V2O5, the AuVOxp-Si always shows rectification while the rectification disappears with metallic vanadium oxide. It is not easy to understand why the Aumetallic VOxp-Si shows an ohmic-like I-V behavior but we presume that the metallic VOx phase may act as a channel through which injected carriers can tunnel between Au and p-Si. It is also interesting to note from the I-V curvesthat the AuVOxp-Si prepared using 500oC-O2-RTA shows higher leakage current than the other two rectifying diodes in spite of the fact that the VOx the most evidently changed to V2O5 according to its XRD result. We report on the formation of V2O5 semiconductor thin films using rapid thermal annealing (RTA) on sputter-deposited amorphous VOX. According to X-ray diffraction results, O2-RTA is more effective to achieve the semiconducting phase. Electrical characterization on Auvanadium oxidep-Si structure exhibited ohmic-like behavior when the thin film mainly contains those metallic phases while the structures were strongly rectifying once the film consists of the semiconducting phase.