Influence of RF power on structural optical and electrical properties of hydrogenated nano-crystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) thin films deposited by PE-CVD

We report synthesis of hydrogenated nanocrystalline silicon (nc-Si:H) thin films by using conventional plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition (PE-CVD) system from gas mixture of pure silane (SiH₄) and hydrogen (H₂). We investigated the effect of RF power on structural, optical and electrical properties using various characterization techniques including Raman spectroscopy, FTIR spectroscopy, UV–visible spectroscopy etc. Low angle XRD and Raman spectroscopy analysis revealed that the RF power in PE-CVD is a critical process parameter to induce nanocrystallization in Si:H films. The FTIR spectroscopy analysis results indicate that with increase in RF power the predominant hydrogen bonding in films shifts from Si–H to Si–H₂ and (Si–H₂)_n bonded species bonded species. However, the bonded hydrogen content didn’t show particular trend with change in RF power. The UV–visible spectroscopy analysis shows that the band tail width (E₀₄–E_Tauc) with increase in RF power. The defect density and Urbach energy also increases with increase in RF power. The highest dark conductivity (and lowest charge carrier activation energy) was obtained for the film deposited at RF power of 125 W indicating that 125 W is optimized RF power of our PE-CVD unit. At this optimized RF power nc-Si:H films with crystallite size ~3.7 nm having good degree of crystallinity (~86.7 %) and high band gap (E_Tauc ~ 2.01 eV and E₀₄ ~ 2.58 eV) were obtained with a low hydrogen content (6.2 at.%) at moderately high deposition rate (0.24 nm/s).