Electrical conductivity and effects of mechanical bending of flexible amorphous transparent conducting CdO-Ga2O3 films synthesized by room temperature sputtering

• Synthesized highly conducting and conductive crystalline and amorphous Cd 1−x Ga x O 1+δ thin films by room temperature sputtering. • Amorphous Cd 1−x Ga x O 1+δ alloys in the composition range of 0.3 < x < 0.4 exhibit a high electron mobility and a low resistivity . • The amorphous films are more resistant to repeated compressive bending while crystalline films experience much less degradation after tensile bending. • Excellent stability and the RT processing make these amorphous alloys useful for flexible and organic photovoltaics. Recently, amorphous ionic oxide semiconductors (AIOSs) have attracted much attention as materials for a wide range of next-generation flexible and transparent optoelectronic devices. Despite their amorphous nature, AIOSs are highly conducting due to their high mobility (>10 cm 2 /V-s) and electron concentration. Typically, they are grown at low temperature with large area uniformity, and hence are compatible with the fabrication of flexible and organic devices. In this study, we synthesize a new class of AIOS, CdO-Ga 2 O 3 alloys on both glass and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) substrates by radio frequency magnetron sputtering at room temperature and explore their properties for flexible electronic applications. Our experimental results show that Cd 1−x Ga x O 1+δ alloy films are amorphous with Ga content x>0.3 and within the amorphous composition range of 0.3