Electrical and Dielectric Characteristics of SrTiO 3 Thin Films Grown by PE-MOCVD Technique

Epitaxial strontium titanate (SrTiO 3 ) thin films have been grown by plasma enhanced metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (PE-MOCVD) technique on different bottom electrode materials, such as Pt/MgO and YBCO/LaAlO 3 . The as grown SrTiO 3 film exhibited an epitaxial structure with orientation perpendicular to the substrates as examined by X-ray diffraction (XRD). The electrical and dielectric properties of the films were investigated by capacitance-voltage (C-V) and current-voltage (I-V) measurements in a temperature range from 80K to 300K. The dielectric constant and dielectric loss were found to be 320 and 0.08 at 100 kHz and room temperature. The dc leakage current density and breakdown voltage were strongly dependent on the choice of the bottom electrode materials. For the films grown on YBCO/LaAlO 3 , the leakage current density is 8.8×10 −7 A/cm 2 at 200 kV/cm and the breakdown voltage is about 2.0 MV/cm. These results indicated that the SrTiO 3 films are suitable for many devices applications. The frequency dependence of the dielectric constant and dielectric loss were studied in the range of 12 Hz to 1 MHz at room temperature. With the increase of the frequency, the dielectric constant showed a little decrease, while the dielectric loss exhibited a sharp increase which could be attributed to the electrode resistance loss.