Integration of ferroelectric Pb(Zr<inf>0.52</inf>Ti<inf>0.48</inf>)O<inf>3</inf> thin films on conducting nanocrystalline diamond for high performance device applications

We report on the direct integration of a Pb(Zr0.52Ti0.48)O3 (PZT) thin film on a hot filament chemical vapor deposition grown conducting boron doped nanocrystalline diamond (B-NCD) film. A conducting B-NCD thin film with a grain size less than 100 nm and surface roughness close to 8 nm is used as a metallic bottom electrode. X-ray diffraction and Raman spectroscopy revealed the single phase perovskite ferroelectric nature of the pulsed laser deposited grown PZT thin film directly on the conducting B-NCD substrate with an electrical resistivity of 10 mΩ-cm. The PZT thin film grown on the B-NCD/Si substrate showed the high remanent polarization (2Pr) of 68 μC/cm2 and high dielectric constant of ∼1300 with a low leakage current density of ∼10−5 A/cm2. Macroscopic and nanoscale polarization switching experiments are performed to confirm the ferroelectric nature of the PZT/B-NCD capacitor. A very small degradation of remanent polarization of 10% even after 1010 switching cycles of the sample demonstrates the excellent ferroelectric performance of the multilayer.