Robust ultrathin and transparent AZO/Ag-SnOx/AZO on polyimide substrate for flexible thin film heater with temperature over 400 °C

We developed flexible and transparent thin film heaters (TFHs) with a structure of AZO/Ag-SnOx/AZO/polyimide (PI) which exhibited superior stability under operational conditions. Ultrathin and robust doped silver (Ag) films were produced by introducing a small amount of SnOx during the sputtering process. The AZO/Ag-SnOx/AZO stacks showed the best figure of merit value of 139.9, which was higher than that of ITO counterpart (25.5) with the same thickness. In addition, it exhibited excellent durability, which showed unaffected optical and electrical properties under the heat treatment of 500 °C for 30 min in air, highly-accelerated temperature and humidity stress test (HAST) at 121 °C and 97%RH for 36 h, 10,000 times of scratching and 1500 times of inner and outer bending test. Furthermore, the TFHs based on AZO/Ag-SnOx/AZO/PI achieved a high temperature of 438.8 °C with response time in several seconds, which outperformed most previous studies. The robust high-temperature TFHs in this research hold promising commercial applications in flexible and high temperature occasions.