ECONOMICS OF DEPOSITING AZO-FRONT TCO COATINGS WITH HIGH WALL THICKNESS ROTARY SINTERED CERAMIC TARGETS

摘要

Aluminium doped zinc-oxide (AZO) is the front transparent conductor of choice for CIGS PVproducts. Whereas the majority of rigid thin film Si PV modules on glass are today still being manufactured with nonsputter deposited F:SnO_2 (fluorine doped tin-oxide, FTO) coated glass, also here sputter deposited AZO is makinginroads as the front TCO. In both of these applications, the market is moving towards rotary ceramic targets with veryhigh wall thicknesses (even up to 20 mm). The manufacturing of such ceramic targets by plasma spraying is onlypossible up to wall thicknesses of about 9 mm. Therefore, thick walled (14 - 20 mm) AZO ceramic targets can onlybe made by bonding multiple cylindrical sintered segments on a backing tube. In this work, a comparison betweendeposition behaviour and obtained coating characteristics will be presented for AZO-1 % thin films using either 13mm or 20 mm sintered ceramic AZO targets. In addition, the total coating costs in either of both cases will becompared. Part of this work has been performed in the framework of the EU-FP7 project SiliconLight.