Direct measurement of electrical hysteresis of micron-sized Pb(Zr,Ti)O 3 capacitors using the constant current method

In this paper, we introduce a constant current method (CCM) for directly measuring the electrical hysteresis of micron-sized Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 capacitors prepared on Pt/Ta/SiO2/Si substrates. The parasitic effect of the probing setup is found to possibly increase the maximum polarization as the capacitor's area is reduced. The CCM technique can be exploited to calculate the parasitic capacitance of the probe station and then easily construct the corrected hysteresis loops. Additionally, the dielectric constants of small capacitors were measured using an LCR meter, for comparison with the linear dielectric constant obtained from the high-field slope of the hysteresis loops with parasitic correction. Strong agreement was found between the measured dielectric constants and the results obtained from the hysteresis loops. These results indicate that the CCM technique represents an approach for investigating the ferroelectric characteristics of small ferroelectric capacitors.