Abstract
Electric fatigue affects the lifetime of ferroelectric materials and has been a major problem in commercial applications of these materials. So it is important to understand ferroelectric fatigue for reliability improvement. This paper proposed a phenomenological model for ferroelectric fatigue based on the structural inhomogeneities by an analogue of the Orowan’s mechanical fatigue theory for conventional materials (Orowan, 1948). This model is very simple, but it does have a number of appealing properties and can describe some fatigue phenomena well. It qualitatively describes the remnant polarization decay as a function of the number of switching cycles; the shorting of highly fatigued samples is caused by the growth of conducting defects.
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