Effects of various deposition times and RF powers on CdTe thin film growth using magnetron sputtering

Cadmium telluride (cdte) is a p-type ii-vi compound semiconductor, which is an active component for producing photovoltaic solar cells in the form of thin films, due to its desirable physical properties. in this study, cdte film was deposited using the radio frequency (rf) magnetron sputtering system onto a glass substrate. to improve the properties of the cdte film, effects of two experimental parameters of deposition time and rf power were investigated on the physical properties of the cdte films. x-ray diffraction (xrd), atomic force microscopy (afm) and spectrophotometer were used to study the structural, morphological and optical properties of the cdte samples grown at different experimental conditions, respectively. our results suggest that film properties strongly depend on the experimental parameters and by optimizing these parameters, it is possible to tune the desired structural, morphological and optical properties. from xrd data, it is found that increasing the deposition time and rf power leads to increasing the crystallinity as well as the crystal sizes of the grown film, and all the films represent zinc blende cubic structure. roughness values given from afm images suggest increasing the roughness of the cdte films by increasing the rf power and deposition times. finally, optical investigations reveal increasing the film band gaps by increasing the rf power and the deposition time.