LAUSR

Ferroelectric materials have unique properties including polarization hysteresis, high permittivity, and enhanced piezoelectric effects. These properties make ferroelectric materials good candidates for applications such as non-volatile memories, capacitors, and sensors. [1] Specifically, ferroelectric random access memory (FRAM) has gained attention over the past decade due to low power consumption and high read/write endurance when compared to flash non-volatile memory technologies. Most ferroelectric materials remain in a polarized state over a limited temperature range. As temperature increases, depolarization gradually occurs until a fully depolarized state is reached at the Curie temperature. Therefore, it is important to characterize the material structure and chemical state/composition of the FRAM data storage capacitors as their properties impact the long-term reliability of FRAM products. The most commonly used materials used in FRAM storage capacitors are lead-zirconium-titanate or Pb[Zr1xTix]O3 (PZT) and lead-free materials such as BaTiO3. [2] In this report, we investigate the reliability of FRAM storage capacitors embedded in a microcontroller using the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) imaging and Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDXS) to determine the structure and the elemental composition of the ceramic storage capacitor.