The PLD of BaTiO 3 target produced by SPS and its electrical properties for MLCC application S. Mustofa a, *, T. Araki b , T. Furusawa a,1 , M. Nishida b , T. Hino c a Department of Material Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Ehime University, No. 3 Bunkyo-cho Matsuyama-shi, Ehime 790-8577, Japan b Faculty of Engineering, Ehime University, 3 Bunkyo-cho, Ehime 790-8577, Japan c Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Niihama National College of Technology, 7-1 Yagumo-cho, Niihama, Ehime 792-8580, Japan Received 17 July 2002; received in revised form 23 April 2003; accepted 5 May 2003 Abstract The pulsed laser deposition (PLD) of barium titanate (BaTiO 3 ) target produced by spark plasma sintering (SPS) has been carried out by using excimer laser. The effects of sintering conditions of SPS on the BaTiO 3 target, the influence of PLD conditions and oxygen pressure on thin film were investigated. Furthermore, the effects of the post-deposition annealing and the oxygen pressure on the dielectric properties were also studied. At a mixing ratio of 2:5 with diameter powder of 0.1 and 0.5 mm and at sintering temperature of 1423 K, the relative density of a sintered compact was 99.6%. At an oxygen pressure of 5 Pa, the ratio of Ba/Ti of thin film was approximately 1, making it ideal as dielectric materials. However, the crystalline of film as deposited was still not obtained. The crystalline BaTiO 3 film with a tetragonal and cubic structure was obtained by annealing at 873 K in the atmosphere for 10 min. At the oxygen pressure below 10 Pa, the relative permittivity increased with the increase of oxygen pressure. The highest relative permittivity was obtained at 5 Pa; the relative permittivity reached 300 at the BaTiO 3 ratio of about 1.0. The surface form of thin film as deposited and after crystallization did not change; it was flat and smooth. # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: BaTiO 3 ; MLCC application; Spark plasma sintering 1. Introduction Following the remarkable progress of Information Technology (IT) revolution in the 21st century, it becomes important to miniaturize and fabricate high capacity multi layer ceramic capacitor (MLCC) that is indispensable for electron devices. The powder sintering technique conventionally used for fabricating MLCC consists of many step-sintering processes, which requires many hours. This makes it unable to follow the foot- steps of improvement the MLCC towards the next generation. In this work, a laser target was fabricated using a spark plasma sintering (SPS) method, which is a new process of powder sintering. The SPS is an effective method for densifying materials that are difficult to sinter in a short time at low sintering temperature compared with the conventional process. The SPS has been applied to sinter metals [1], alloys [2,3] ceramics [4 / 6] functionally gradient materials [7,8] and other materi- als [9  /11]. Barium titanate (BaTiO 3 ) as one of the most im- portant ferroelectric materials has been studied inten- sively. It possess a variety of useful properties that have potential to be exploited in thin film devices, such as non-volatile memory devices, electro-optic devices, thin film capacitors, and pyroelectric detectors [12  /14]. Therefore, a great deal of effort has been made to investigate the preparation and characterization of BaTiO 3 thin films in recent years. A variety of methods, such as sputtering [15,16] metal organic chemical vapor deposition [17,18] and Pulsed Laser Deposition (PLD) [19  /21] have been applied to prepare such films, and many high quality BaTiO 3 films have been deposited successfully by using these methods. Among these * Corresponding author. Tel.:  /81-89-927-9890; fax:  /81-89-927- 9889. E-mail address: mustofa@eng.ehime-u.ac.jp (S. Mustofa). 1 Present address: Fukui Murata Manufacturing Co., Japan. Materials Science and Engineering B103 (2003) 128  /134 www.elsevier.com/locate/mseb 0921-5107/03/$ - see front matter # 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0921-5107(03)00160-0