Molar concentration effect on MgO thin films properties

Magnesium Oxide, MgO is inorganic material with wide band gap (7.8eV) and suitable to be used as dielectric layer. Due to its chemical and structural properties, MgO also can be used as template to prepare ferroelectric thin film [1–3]. In this work, MgO thin films with different molar concentration from 0.1M to 1M were prepared using sol-gel spin coating technique. Magnesium acetate tetrahydrate, ethanol and nitric acid were used as precursor, solvent and stabilizer respectively. The MgO thin films were deposited on the glass substrate and subjected to electrical and structural characterizations. Both electrical and structural characterizations were performed using two point probes (BUKOH KEIKI-EP2000), surface profiler (Veeco) and atomic force microscope respectively. The experimental results show that the thin films resistivity increased from 5.09 ×103 Ω.cm to 2.33 ×104 Ω.cm as the precursor molar concentration increased. The MgO films with 0.4M was observed to be the best MgO films to be used as dielectric layer due to its electrical and structural properties which are uniform, non-porous and small particle size around 43nm.