Structure and electrical properties of rapid thermally annealed PZT films deposited through sol-gel process

In present work, sol-gel process is used to direct the organization of high quality and pore-free parasite PZT thin films with a composition near the morphotropic phase boundary (Zr/Ti = 52/48). The PZT transparent sol can be obtained by dissolving the zirconium oxynitrate, butyl titanate and lead acetate in ethylene glycol with the molar ratio of 0.52:0.48:1 and the PZT gel can be gained by spin-coating. In such process, PZT thin films can be readily prepared by hydrolysis on hot plate at 350°C for 20min and annealing in RTA at 650°C for 1 minute. The structural and electric characteristics of the films have been carried out by XRD, AFM and the C-V measurements, etc. Experimental results have indicated that by treating film RTA at 650D for 1 minute film with perfect crystallization and good surface morphology with a RMS roughness of 2.0nm can be obtained, and the remnant polarization Pr (28.5 μC/cm ²) and coercive field Ec (39.8kV/cm) are obtained in the P-E hysteresis loops. The films have a dielectric constant ε of 1080 and a dielectric loss tanδ of 0.01 at 1 kHz. Ferroelectric polarization fatigue test of the films has shown that high fatigue resistance up to 3 × 10 ¹⁰ cycles before Pr is decreased by 50%.