The silicon-based microelectronics industry is rapidly approaching a point where device fabrication can no longer be simply scaled to progressively smaller sizes. Technological decisions must now be made that will substantially alter the directions along which silicon devices continue to develop. One such challenge is the need for higher permittivity dielectrics to replace silicon dioxide, the properties of which have hitherto been instrumental to the industry's success. Considerable efforts have already been made to develop replacement dielectrics for dynamic random-access memories. These developments serve to illustrate the magnitude of the now urgent problem of identifying alternatives to silicon dioxide for the gate dielectric in logic devices, such as the ubiquitous field-effect transistor.

The temperature and thickness dependence of permittivity of (Ba,Sr)TiO3 has been investigated. The films were deposited by liquid-source metalorganic chemical vapor deposition onto Pt/SiO2/Si, with thicknesses ranging from 15 to 580 nm. The dielectric response was measured from 100 to 520 K. As film thickness decreased, the maximum dielectric constant decreased, the temperature at which the maximum dielectric constant occurred decreased, and the peak in the dielectric constant became more diffuse. A model incorporating a thickness independent interior and a nonferroelectric surface cannot account for these thickness dependencies. To appropriately model these observations a physical model containing thickness and temperature dependent interior and surface components is necessary.

Capacitor technologies are as varied as the applications that they enable, but one of the common themes in advanced capacitors for consumer electronics is a desire for increased capacitance in smaller areas/volumes. The heroic advances of discrete capacitor manufacturers have kept pace with the increasing demands of miniaturization, but a time is quickly approaching when it appears that powder‐based fabrication techniques simply will not be able to achieve desired layer thicknesses and capacitance densities. Here, we review the current state of the art and recent advances in the processing science and technology of high‐permittivity thin films with a focus on industrially scalable solution‐based fabrication processes of perovskite ferroelectric systems that appear to offer the greatest promise for the fabrication of future nanoscale capacitors.

The piezoelectric, dielectric, and ferroelectric properties of highly (111)-textured, 200-nm-thick polycrystalline lead zirconate titanate (PZT) films have been investigated as a function of Zr/Ti ratio. The distinct peak in piezoelectric coefficient at the morphotropic phase boundary found in bulk PZT ceramics is not observed in thin film PZTs. Measurements of the temperature dependence of relative permittivity and the nonlinear behavior of relative permittivity and piezoelectric coefficient suggest that non-180° domain wall motion in these films is negligible, indicating that the extrinsic contribution to the room temperature permittivity is dominated by only 180° domain wall motion. The semiempirical phenomenological equation relating the piezoelectric coefficient to measured polarization and permittivity values is demonstrated to give an excellent description of the piezoelectric behavior in these films, assuming bulk electrostrictive and elastic coefficients. The small deviation between calculated and measured piezoelectric coefficients as well as the dependence of piezoelectric and polarization behavior on the external field, i.e., hysteresis loop, are suggested to be primarily due to backswitching of 180° domains.

We present experimental measurements of the thermal boundary conductance (TBC) from 78–500 K across isolated heteroepitaxially grown ZnO films on GaN substrates. This data provides an assessment of the underlying assumptions driving phonon gas-based models, such as the diffuse mismatch model (DMM), and atomistic Green’s function (AGF) formalisms used to predict TBC. Our measurements, when compared to previous experimental data, suggest that TBC can be influenced by long wavelength, zone center modes in a material on one side of the interface as opposed to the ‘“vibrational mismatch”’ concept assumed in the DMM; this disagreement is pronounced at high temperatures. At room temperature, we measure the ZnO/GaN TBC as 490­[+150,–110] MW m–2 K–1. The disagreement among the DMM and AGF, and the experimental data at elevated temperatures, suggests a non-negligible contribution from other types of modes that are not accounted for in the fundamental assumptions of these harmonic based formalisms, which may rely on anharmonicity. Given the high quality of these ZnO/GaN interfaces, these results provide an invaluable, critical, and quantitative assessment of the accuracy of assumptions in the current state of the art computational approaches used to predict phonon TBC across interfaces.