Silver deposition

[Youngjo]

Hello! I have a question.

 

Do I have to deposite the chromium on the glass for silver deposition?

Chromium is too dark to make device such as OLED or solar cell.

I want to increase transmittance... so............................

Do you have any idea about silver deposition without chromium on the glass?

(Lilke surface treatment using solution.)

 

Thank you for your favor

[Klaynos]

How thick do you want the silver?

How important is connectivity/islandisation to you? Does it have to be a continuous film?

Have you considered other conductive coatings such as ITO?

I assume you're evaporating your metal, what kind of deposition rates do you require?

[Youngjo]

The metal tickness is 5nm, 10nm, and 25nm.

Since I replace to ITO, I'll use silver-coated substrate on glass.

[Klaynos]

There are specific cleaning methods you can use, ending with drag cleaning IPA works well I seem to recall. The 25nm film should be at least percolating so will be conducting, for an evaporation rate of ~0.1nm/second our system creates percolating films with mass-thickness of ~10nm for silver.

 

You can also anneal the sample, this should reduce the islandisation of the films. 5nm is a very very low mass-thickness though, I'm not sure you could ever get anything close to a continuous film with that.

[Enthalpy]

I saw such a silver deposition on glass many many years ago, in a chemistry class.

It was very easy, something like silver nitrate, freshly mixed with an amine or some reducing agent, at room temperature.

Any solid surface, including the glass ware, catalysed silver reduction and produced the deposition. A known reaction.

 

Unclear to me: how good such a silver layer is. It was mirror-smooth, and I believe mirrors were produced by that reaction very long ago.

Dilute the reactants to deposit a thinner layer.

 

I nearly suggested ITO... The one you want to replace.

 

Annealing might improve - or not! I can imagine silver movement allows it to group into lands.

 

Did you try to just evaporate the metal? When I evaporated aluminium with an electron gun, the film was translucent at the beginning, so thinner should be transparent.

Keeping the target at moderate temperature might give a better uniformity.

[iF you still find such an equipment! It was during the paleo-silicon era, at 6µm channel length, when grooves were etched with a flint, and implantation made with a blowpipe]

 

Do I remember that silver is rather mobile in solids? Maybe silver is unwanted in your Oled as a poison, and chromium acts as a diffusion barrier. Platinum and tungsten have been used for that purpose, when gold served as a conductor but was unwanted in the underlying semiconductor.

 

And: why shouldn't you have a thicker mesh of metal, instead of a uniform, very thin film? If the mesh is narrow, users won't see it. Current collection to the metal lines could occur by natural surface conduction, or through a separate layer. To cross 10µm distance with 1000* 10mm width, ITO conduces enough! Solar cells use a (coarse) mesh combined with a (resistive) doped layer to obtain transparency and conductivity.