The Transmittance Modulation of ZnO/Cu/ZnO Transparent Conductive Electrodes Prepared on Glass Substrates

With the explosive development of optoelectronic devices, the need for high-performance transparent conductive (TCE) electrodes for optoelectronic devices has been increasing accordingly. The two major TCE requirements are (1) visible light average transmittance higher than 80% and (2) sheet resistance lower than 10 Ω/sq. In this study, we investigated the critical role of the top and bottom ZnO thicknesses for the ZnO/Cu/ZnO electrodes prepared on glass substrates. It was shown that the required Cu thickness to meet the conductivity requirement is 8 nm, which was fixed and then the thicknesses of the top and ZnO layers were independently varied to experimentally determine the optimized conditions for optical transparency. The thicknesses of the top and bottom ZnO layers were both found to significantly affect the peak transmittance as well as the average visible light transmittance. The ZnO/Cu/ZnO electrode exhibits peak and average transmittance of 95.4% and 87.4%, excluding the transmittance of glass substrates, along with a sheet resistance of 9.7 Ω/sq, with a corresponding Haacke's figure of merit (φH=Tave10Rs) of 0.064, which exceeds the reported value for the ZnO/Cu/ZnO electrodes, manifesting the need of experimental optimization in this study.