Effect of substrate temperature on structural, optical and electrical properties of sputtered NiO-Ag nanocrystalline thin films

NiO-Ag thin films were deposited on Corning 7059 glass substrates by DC reactive magnetron sputtering technique and investigated the substrate temperature ( T s ) dependent properties of NiO-Ag thin films. X-ray diffraction results showed that crystalline films can be obtained at high T s and all films have a preferred crystal growth texture with face centered cubic ( f cc ) structure and was also confirmed by Raman studies. The grain size, transmittance, band gap, mobility and carrier concentrations were increased with T s . Room temperature deposited films have an average roughness around 6.9 nm where as increment of T s resulted in increased roughness up to 14 nm with nanocrystalline morphology. The optimum substrate temperature to obtain NiO-Ag films was found to be 200°C. It was found that with increasing the T s , resistivity of the films was significantly decreased.