Epitaxial Oxides on Silicon by Pulsed Laser Deposition
Within the perovskite oxides a wide range of physical properties can be found, making this class of materials interesting for use in new types of microelectronic devices. The microelectronic industry is silicon based, which requires integration of these oxides on silicon. This integration should be epitaxial, because the functional properties depend on the crystalline quality of the perovskite oxide and because of the ability to make use of anisotropy in these properties. Epitaxial growth on silicon is not straightforward. Most of the perovskite oxides are chemically unstable on silicon, while the amorphous silicon native oxide prevents the silicon lattice from influencing the perovskite orientation. Therefore, a buffer layer should be incorporated between silicon and most of the perovskites. In this thesis, several strategies were investigated to obtain such a buffer by Pulsed Laser Deposition, since this technique is very suitable to grow oxides and can be used to deposit on industrial size silicon wafers.
