Development of Indium-Tin Oxide Thin Films on PAMAM Dendrimer Layers for Perovskite Solar Cells Application

Despite the dramatic progress that has been made in the power-conversion efficiencyEfficiency (PCE) of perovskite solar cells (PVSCs), there are still many obstacles to be overcome before these devices can be economically competitive in the photovoltaics market. One of the major hurdles in the commercialization of PVSCs is low stability, which severely limits the effective lifetime of the devices. One of the approaches to achieving higher stability and lifetime of PVSCs is improvement of PVSC film quality. In this paper, we have employed a PAMAM dendrimer layer to reduce the surface roughness of sputter-deposited indium-tin oxide (ITOIndium tin oxide (ITO)) films, which were then used in the fabrication of PVSCs. A PAMAM-8 dendrimer layer was deposited by dip-coating the substrates in 25 mL of a 1 μM PAMAM-8 ethanol solution before ITOIndium tin oxide (ITO) deposition. X-ray refractivity (XRR) was used to verify the PAMAM layer on the substrate. ITOIndium tin oxide (ITO) films of 150 nm thickness were then deposited onto the PAMAM layer using DC magnetron reactive sputteringSputtering. The surface roughness, sheet resistanceSheet Resistance, and transmissivity of the ITOIndium tin oxide (ITO) films were optimized by varying the parameters of the sputteringSputtering process. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) was used to measure the surface roughness of the ITOIndium tin oxide (ITO) films with and without PAMAM dendrimer layer. A root-mean-square (RMS) film roughness of 1.6 nm, sheet resistanceSheet Resistance of 21 Ω/Υ, and transmissivity of > 91% at a wavelength of 400–700 nm were obtained after optimization.