Impact of Annealing Temperature on Spin Coated V2O5 Thin Films as Interfacial Layer in Cu/V2O5/n-Si Structured Schottky Barrier Diodes

In this paper, we report the influence of thermal annealing on structural, electrical properties V 2 O 5 thin films and their application of SBD’s. V 2 O 5 thin films were prepared using glass substrate by sol gel spin coating technique. Films were annealed at different temperatures such as 300 °C, 400 °C and 500 °C. The prepared films were introduced as an interfacial layer between metal and semiconductor interface. V 2 O 5 films exhibit single phase tetragonal structure and surface morphology interestingly, it was changed into nanorod-like structure at higher annealing temperature which was observed through field emission scanning electron microscopy. Atomic force microscopy reveals the surface roughness and the mentioned roughness is increasing due to the increase of annealing temperature. The elemental composition was confirmed by energy dispersive X-ray spectrum. From UV–Vis absorption spectroscopy results revealed that the band gap shows a decreasing trend on increasing the annealing temperature. Besides, we analyzed the influence of high quality vanadium pentoxide (V 2 O 5 ) thin films prepared at different annealed temperatures and act as an interfacial layer between metal and semiconductor in the fabrication of Schottky diode. V 2 O 5 films depicts high electrical conductivity (σ dc ) of 0.945 (S cm −1 ) with activation energy of 0.0747 eV (E a ) as a function of temperature. The MIS structured Cu/V 2 O 5 /n-Si based SBD’s diode performance was analyzed for different temperatures ranging from 30 to 150 °C. V 2 O 5 thin-film act as an interfacial layer on Cu/V 2 O 5 /n-Si Schottky diode was successfully explained by the thermionic emission theory.