Piezoelectric Size Effects in a Zinc Oxide Micropillar

In this work, the dependence of piezoelectric coefficients (PE) on the size of artificial fabricated ZnO micropillars on Si substrate is investigated. ZnO full film is grown with c-axis orientation and an average grain size of 20 nm at a substrate temperature of 500 °C by pulsed laser ablation. The micropillars with the size range of 1.5 to 7 μm are formed by top-down semiconductor device processing. The PE, characterized by piezoelectric force microscopy (PFM), is found to increase from 18.2 to 46.9 pm/V, when the ZnO pillar size is reduced from 7 to 1.5 μm. The strong PE dependence on ZnO pillar size can be explained by local changes in polarization and reduction of unit cell volume with respect to bulk values. These results have strong implications in the field of energy harvesting, as piezoelectric voltage output scales with the piezoelectric coefficient.