A comparative study of the effect of annealing and plasma treatments on the microstructure and properties of colloidal indium tin oxide films and cold-sputtered indium tin oxide films

► Transparent ITO films made by cold-sputtering; and by spin coating of colloidal ITO. ► Characterized with XRD, SEM, AFM, XPS, optical transmission, impedance spectroscopy. ► Argon annealing of cold-sputtered films gives lower resistivity than air annealing. ► Air annealing of colloidal films decreases resistivity by 8-9 orders of magnitude. ► Ar-O2 RIE alone decreases colloidal ITO film resistivity by 4 orders of magnitude.