Characteristics of sol-gel based deposited ITO Nanoparticulate films

Over the last decades, the use of transparent conducting oxide (TCO) coating has increased exponentially for many applications due to its low sheet resistance and the high optical transparency. One of the most important TCOs is ITO (indium tin oxide, In2O3 : Sn). For the Traditional deposition techniques, the main problem is the amorphous nature of the as-deposited ITO layers and heat treatment at high temperatures is required to obtain high quality films. Sol-gel based deposition of sol containing conductive ITO nanocrystals is an alternative approach solving these problems. This book comes to explore some physical properties of nanoparticulate ITO films. Its first part provides some details on the synthesis of ITO nanoparticles and the sol-gel deposition of nanoparticulate ITO films. The second part describes some photolithography techniques used for patterning of ITO films. The last part correlates the optical and electrical properties of ITO films by using different dielectric function models. The book should be useful to professionals in sol-gel and nanotechnology fields as well as transparent conducting oxide films.