This study addresses the electrical and optical properties as well as the surface structure after wet-chemical etching of mid-frequency magnetron sputtered aluminium, doped zinc oxide (ZnO:Al) films on glass substrates from rotatable ceramic targets. Etching of an as-deposited ZnO:Al film in acid leads to rough surfaces with various feature sizes. The influence of working pressure and substrate temperature on the surface topography after etching was investigated. It was found that the growth model which Kluth et al. applied to films sputtered in radio frequency mode from planar ceramic target can be transferred to film growth from tube target. Furthermore, the influence of Ar gas flow and discharge power on the film properties was investigated. We achieved low resistivity of about 5.4x 10(-4) Omega.CM at high growth rates of 120 nm.m/min. Finally, surface textured ZnO:AI films were applied as substrates for microcrystalline silicon solar cells and high efficiencies of up to 8.49% were obtained. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.