Fabrication and characterization of flexible Ag/ZnO Schottky diodes on polyimide substrates

In this paper, we report on the fabrication of flexible Ag/ZnO Schottky diodes on polyimide substrates by pulsed laser deposition. The structural and optical properties of the ZnO films were investigated by X-ray diffractometry and spectrophotometry. The current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of flexible Schottky diodes with and without bending were measured at room temperature. The results show that the devices have good rectifying behaviors with an ideality factor of 2.8 and a Schottky barrier height of 0.54 eV according to the I-V characteristics. It was seen that the forward bias current-voltage characteristics at sufficiently large voltages have shown the effect of series resistance. The values of the ideality factor, series resistance and barrier height obtained from Cheung and Norde methods were compared, and it was seen that there was an agreement with each other. The results show that the electrical properties of flexible diodes change little when measured with or without bending condition, indicating that the devices have potential applications in flexible electronics. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.