Characterisation of Ferroelectric Bulk Materials and Thin Films

Ferroelectricity and piezoelectricity are materials properties that find applications in sensors, actuators, and memory devices. There is a growing demand by industry to adapt and integrate piezoelectric materials into ever smaller devices and structures such as piezoelectric ink-jet printing for conventional and direct write printing applications, faster thermal imaging systems, MEMS based micro-pumps for drug delivery, fluid mixing (lab on a chip), acoustic sensing, MEMS based sensors and transducers, memories with better fatigue performance, and more. Such applications development requires the joint development of reliable, robust, accurate and most importantly relevant and applicable measurement and characterisation methods and models. A traditional dependence on low power, bulk characterisation methods is wholly inappropriate because the materials in thin or thick film form are either driven under much higher fields and/or their performance is limited by the very different boundary conditions afforded by their 2D symmetry. Therefore, in the past few years there has been a rapid development of new techniques to model and measure the variety of properties that are deemed important for applications in development. In this book, an assembly of physical measurement and engineering modelling best practice is explored, with a strong emphasis on application of the methods via worked examples and detailed experimental procedural descriptions.