Functional ceramics have become a news stage with the concept that different kinds of materials, no matter they are organic or inorganic with different functional effects, can be composed together to find a new material by multilayer thin film technologies. In this paper the design of new creative sensors, devices and system is proposed, which is based on: (1) Variation of spontaneous polarization P_s which can be induced or attended to maximum change during phase transformation; (2) Functional thin film materials which can be induced phase transitions by applied stress, temperature or electric field and these exhibit extraordinary piezoelectric, pyroelectric, electrostrictive, electro-optic, etc. and field effect properties in comparison with bulk materials so far existed; (3) Composite of these effects through thin film integrated technology to design new intelligent sensors; (4) Connecting equivalent circuits of functional elements, devices and electronic circuits to design new intelligent systems. As an example, a pyroelectric voltage transformer was introduced. The principle demonstration and experimental results are discussed.

Date Published: 20 February 1998
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 3175, Third International Conference on Thin Film Physics and Applications, (20 February 1998);

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 3175:
Third International Conference on Thin Film Physics and Applications
Shixun Zhou; Yongling Wang; Yi-Xin Chen; Shuzheng Mao, Editor(s)