This report contains details of the research work carried out on a one-year project on the growth and characterization of ZnO and AlN piezoelectric thin films. Material growth systems are reported for ZnO using the zinc vapor reaction with CO2, ZnCl2 with O2, and the latest metal-organic process. The growth of insulating ZnO has been achieved using lithium doping during film growth. Initial results are reported for a new AlN growth process that shows promise of overcoming some previous growth problems. (Author).

Recently, piezoelectric materials, like lead titanate zirconate Pb(ZrxTi1-x)O3 (PZT), zinc oxide ZnO, and the solid solution Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3-PbTiO3 (PMN-PT), increasingly receive intensive studies because of their innovative applications in the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). In order to integrate them on silicon substrate, several preliminaries must be taken into considerations, e.g. buffer layer, bottom electrode. In this thesis, piezoelectric films (PZT and PMN-PT) have been successfully epitaxially grown on silicon and SOI (silicon-on-insulator) in the form of single crystal by sol-gel process. In fact, recent studies show that single crystalline films seem to possess the superior properties than that of polycrystalline films, leading to an increase of the performance of MEMS devices. The first objective of this thesis was to realize the epitaxial growth of single crystalline film of piezoelectric materials on silicon. The use of a buffer layer of gadolinium oxide(Gd2O3) or strontium titanate (SrTiO3 or STO) deposited by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) has been studied in detail to integrate epitaxial PZT and PMN-PT films on silicon. For Gd2O3/Si(111) system, the study of X-ray diffraction (XRD) on the growth of PZT film shows that the film is polycrystalline with coexistence of the nonferroelectric parasite phase, i.e. pyrochlore phase. On the other hand, the PZT film deposited on STO/Si(001) substrate is successfully epitaxially grown in the form of single crystalline film. In order to measure the electrical properties, a layer of strontium ruthenate (SrRuO3 or SRO) deposited by pulsed laser deposition (PLD) has been employed for bottom electrode due to its excellent conductivity and perovskite crystalline structure similar to that of PZT. The electrical characterization on Ru/PZT/SRO capacitors demonstrates good ferroelectric properties with the presence of hysteresis loop. Besides, the relaxor ferroelectric PMN-PT has been also epitaxially grown on STO/Si and confirmed by XRD and transmission electrical microscopy (TEM). This single crystalline film has the perovskite phase without the appearance of pyrochlore. Moreover, the study of infrared transmission using synchrotron radiation has proven a diffused phase transition over a large range of temperature, indicating a typical relaxor ferroelectric material. The other interesting in the single crystalline PZT films deposited on silicon and SOI is to employ them in the application of MEMS devices, where the standard silicon techniques are used. The microfabrication process performed in the cleanroom has permitted to realize cantilevers and membranes in order to mechanically characterize the piezoelectric layers. Mechanical deflection under the application of an electric voltage could be detected by interferometry. Eventually, this characterization by interferometry has been studied using the modeling based on finite element method and analytic method. In the future, it will be necessary to optimize the microfabrication process of MEMS devices based on single crystalline piezoelectric films in order to ameliorate the electromechanical performance. Finally, the characterizations at MEMS device level must be developed for their utilization in the future applications.