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In this work, the analysis of the temperature-dependent electrical conductivity of highly crystalline zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films obtained by the Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) method is performed. It is deduced that the most important scattering mechanisms are: scattering by ionized defects (at low temperatures) as well as by phonons (mainly optical ones) at higher temperatures. Nevertheless, the role of grain boundaries in the carrier mobility limitation ought to be included as well. These conclusions are based on theoretical analysis and temperature-dependent Hall mobility measurements. The presented results prove that existing models can explain the mobility behavior in the ALD-ZnO films, being helpful for understanding their transport properties, which are strongly related both to the crystalline quality of deposited ZnO material and defects in its lattice.

We report on zinc oxide thin films grown by atomic layer deposition at a low temperature, which is compatible with a low thermal budget required for some novel electronic devices. By selecting appropriate precursors and process parameters, we were able to obtain films with controllable electrical parameters, from heavily n-type to the resistive ones. Optimization of the growth process together with the low temperature deposition led to ZnO thin films, in which no defect-related photoluminescence bands are observed. Such films show anticorrelation between mobility and free-electron concentration, which indicates that low n electron concentration is a result of lower number of defects rather than the self-compensation effect.

We report on the zinc oxide (ZnO) thin films obtained by the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method using diethyl zinc and water precursors, which allowed us to lower deposition temperature to below 200 °C. The so-obtained “as grown” ZnO layers are polycrystalline and show excitonic photoluminescence (PL) at room temperature, even if the deposition temperature was lowered down to 100 °C. Defect-related PL bands are of low intensity and are absent for layers grown at 140−200 °C. This is evidence that extremely low temperature growth by ALD can result in high quality ZnO thin films with inefficient nonradiative decay channels and with thermodynamically blocked self-compensation processes.