Pulsed laser deposited lead zirconate titanate thin films for micro actuators

Lead zirconate Titanate (PbZr/sub 0.52/Ti/sub 0.48/O/sub 3/: PZT) thin films with excellent piezoelectricity have attracted great attention in microfabricated devices such as micro sensors and micro actuators. In order to prepare piezoelectric PZT thin films, many fabrication techniques such as sol-gel process, laser ablation and sputtering have been used. We have developed sol-gel process and fabricated the micro scanners actuated by sol-gel derived PZT thin films in our previous studies. However, there still are problems such as low deposition rate by sol-gel process. In this study, we prepared highly orientated PZT thin films for micro actuators by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) on the Si substrates with Pt bottom electrodes and one sol-gel derived PZT seed layer.