Functional Designs of Metal oxide for Transparent Electronics

Transparent materials are necessary for most photoelectric devices, which allow the light generation from electric energy or vice versa. Metal oxides are usual materials for transparent conductors to have high optical transmittance with good electrical properties. Functional designs may apply in various applications, including solar cells, photodetectors, and transparent heaters. Nanoscale structures are effective to drive the incident light into light-absorbing semiconductor layer to improve solar cell performances. Recently, the new metal oxide materials have inaugurated functional device applications. Nickel oxide (NiO) is the strong p-type metal oxide and has been applied for all transparent metal oxide photodetector by combining with n-type ZnO. The abrupt p-NiO/n-ZnO heterojunction device has a high transmittance of 90% for visible light but absorbs almost entire UV wavelength light to show the record fastest photoresponse time of 24 ms. For other applications, NiO has been applied for solar cells and transparent heaters to induce the enhanced performances due to its optical and electrical benefits. We discuss the high possibility of metal oxides for current and future transparent electronic applications.