Template controlled growth

Abstract

By means of ferroelectric nanograins various template based approaches to a registered assembly of functional materials is reviewed. At first the principles of seeds and seedlayers for orientation selection are discussed. Then the generation of artificial seed pattern by a number of top-down and bottom-up methods as well as combination of them are discussed. As such (1) e-beam lithography, (2) e-beam lithography combined with lift off processing, (3) soft template infiltration, (4) a self-assembly approach based on diblock-copolymer micelles and gold hard masks, and (5) FIB to generate defined nucleation sites on platinized silicon within an amorphous TiO2 layer are detailed. Functional registered ferroelectrics, mainly obtained by subsequent CSD processing, were characterized by means of surface probe microscopy (SPM) methods such as atomic force microscopy (AFM) and piezoelectric force microscopy (PFM). Embedding concepts for the template grown ferroelectric nanograins, which enable to maintain ferroelectric properties, complement the template controlled growth methods with regard to possible integration.