Cobalt oxide thin films were prepared by using the dipping sol-gel process. The films were deposited onto glass slides, starting from methanolic solution of cobalt acetate Co(CH3COO)2 · 4H2O. The effects of film thickness and sol concentration on structural and optical properties were studied. Structural analyses of Co3O4 films were performed by X-ray diffraction. The film thickness was varied by using different withdrawal speeds and the number of dipping-heating cycles. It was found that the grain size increases with the number of dipping N. The results point out to some compacting effect that increases with the number of dippings: the films exhibit direct and indirect optical transition, absorption coefficients are of the order of 104 cm-1, and upon annealing the absorption coefficient increases. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

This paper presents the performances of an in-line plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition system constituted by 5 chambers and one external unloaded chamber used in the simultaneous manufacturing of 4 large (30 cm × 40 cm) solar cells deposited on glass substrates. The system is fully automatically controlled by a Programmable Logic Controller using a specific developed software that allows devices mass production without losing the flexibility to perform process innovations according to the industrial requests, i.e. fast and secure changes and optimizations. Overall, the process shift is of about 15 min per each set of 4 solar cells. Without a buffer layer, solar cells with efficiencies of about 9% were produced by the proper tuning of the i-layer production conditions. © 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

In this work metal induced crystallization (MIC) using nickel (Ni) was employed to obtain poly-Si by crystallization of amorphous films for application as active layer in TFTs. Ni layers with thicknesses of 0.5 nm, 1 nm and 2 nm were used to crystallize the silicon. The TFTs were produced with a bottom gate configuration using a multi-layer Al2O3/TiO2 insulator produced by atomic layer deposition (ALD) as gate dielectric. The best performances of the TFT produced were obtained when using very thin Ni layers for the crystallization. This is attributed to a lower metal contamination and to the enhancement of grain size, as a result of the lower nucleation density achieved, when using the thinnest Ni layer. Devices that exhibit effective mobility of 45.5 cm2V-1s-1 and an on/off ratio of 5.55×104 were produced using a 0.5 nm Ni layer to crystallize the active channel area.