Thick soft and hard lead zirconate titanate (PZT) films are fabricated on alumina substrates using the screen-printing technique. The geometries of the substrates are suited to three different mechanical characterization tests devoted to the determination of the Young’s modulus of the films: a dynamic, a quasi-static and a nanoindentation test. Values of 52 8 and 20 7 GPa for the Young’s modulu...

Wafer-scale arrays of well-ordered Pb(Zr(0.2)Ti(0.8))O3 nanodiscs and nanorings were fabricated on the entire area (10 mm x 10 mm) of the SrRuO3 bottom electrode on an SrTiO3 single-crystal substrate using the laser interference lithography (LIL) process combined with pulsed laser deposition. The shape and size of the nanostructures were controlled by the amount of PZT deposited through the pat...

During dental sinus lift surgery, it is important to monitor the thickness of the remaining maxilla to avoid perforating the sinus membrane. Therefore, a sensor should be integrated into ultrasonic dental tools to prevent undesirable damage. This paper presents a piezoelectric (PZT) sensor installed in an ultrasonic transducer to measure the stiffness of high and low materials. Four design type...

Novel designs of an array of piezoelectric stack actuators using a unique buckling mechanism are presented in this paper. Multiple PZT actuator units with high gain displacement amplification mechanisms are arranged in parallel with spatial phase differences. Having an inherent kinematic singularity, the buckling mechanism provides not only an extremely high gain of displacement amplification, ...

Thickness mode piezoelectric micro-electromechanical system (MEMS) ultrasound transducers, operating in the 50-75 MHz range, have been fabricated using a composite sol gel technique in combination with wet etching. The composite sol gel technique involves producing a PZT powder/sol composite slurry, which when spun down yields films a few micrometers thick. Repeated layering, and infiltration, ...

We have developed a method of forming PZT films on silicon substrates with a high piezoelectric coefficient using RF sputtering. Films have been formed on 6-inch wafers with thickness variation of less than +/− 5% across the entire wafer. Our PZT film has an unusually high content of Nb dopant (13%) which results in 1.7-fold higher piezoelectric coefficient than sputtered PZT films previously r...

This paper presents the microfabrication of an acoustic impedance gradient matching layer on a spherically-shaped piezoelectric ultrasonic transducer. The acoustic matching layer can be designed to achieve higher acoustic energy transmission and operating bandwidth. Also included in this paper are a theoretical analysis of the device design and a micromachining technique to produce the novel tr...

In this report, ordered lead zirconate titanate Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 (PZT) nanodot arrays were fabricated by an original one-step mask etching route. The one-step mask etching strategy is based on the patterned nanostructure of barrier layer (BL) at the bottom of anodic aluminum oxide (AAO), by a direct transfer of the nanopattern from BL to the pre-deposited PZT film, without introduction of any...

The evolution of stored ferroelectric polarization in PZT thin film capacitors was imaged using synchrotron x-ray microdiffraction with a submicron-diameter focused incident x-ray beam. To form the capacitors, an epitaxial Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) thin film was deposited on an epitaxiallygrown conductive SrRuO3 (SRO) bottom electrode on a SrTiO3 (STO) (001) substrate. Polycrystalline SRO or Pt top ele...