High-quality Al-doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al; AZO) films are very attractive materials due to relatively low cost, non toxicity and stability at high temperature, and also they are being extensively investigated to apply to various fields such as solar cells, flat panel displays and organic light emitting diodes.

In this work, we investigated the electrical, optical and structural properties of AZO film grown on the glass by RF magnetron sputtering method with zinc oxide target doped Al₂O₃(2 wt%). AZO films were synthesized at the pressure of 1mTorr with RF power varied from 100 W to 175 W. The optimized AZO film had the transmittance above 85% at visible region and the resistivity of 1.5 × 10^-3 ohm-cm at room temperature. The characteristics of AZO film were investigated by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Hall measurement system, UV-visible spectroscopy, and atomic force microscopy (AFM).

In addition, the optimized AZO film in this work was applied to a transparent electrode for an inverted organic solar cells (AZO/P3HT:PCBM/PEDOT:PSS/Au) which was compared with the organic solar cell with the standard structure using indium tin oxide (ITO) as the electrode.