Why do electronic devices fail?

A class of electronic materials undergo fatigue and then failure

Tens of millions of tonnes of failed electronic devices go to landfills every year.

Electronic devices can fail in a number of ways — from failed capacitors, short-circuited chips, broken screens, etc.

One of these mechanisms involves a type of material called ferroelectrics. Very briefly, this is a material — usually an oxide ceramic — that will undergo volume change when an electric field is applied.

This is also what a piezoelectric does — except that ferroelectrics change the direction of their response when the field is reversed.

Thus, all ferroelectrics are piezoelectrics but not all piezoelectrics are ferroelectrics.

Ferroelectrics find applications everywhere — from earthquake sensors, motion detectors, energy harvesting devices, atomic force microscopes, printers, memory devices, etc.

However, they undergo fatigue and failure. With repeated loading, the performance of most ferroelectrics goes down and the device eventually stops responding.

The reason for ‘ferroelectric fatigue’ has been debated — not least because it is likely a complex Spatio-temporal mechanism.

Now, researchers have identified specific failure pathways through the direct observation of fatigue in a ferroelectric while it is in action.

They used an in-situ biasing TEM to watch the ferro response of Pb(Mg1/3Nb2/3)O3–0.38PbTiO3 (PMN-0.38PT) single crystals.

So, the field applied to the sample was repeatedly reversed while it was being overserved inside the microscope.

At the microscale, ferroelectrics are broken down into a number of smaller regions each of which behaves like a smaller ferroelectric. These ‘domains’ switch their direction in response to the field.

However, with repeated use, random charges (think stray ions, vacancies etc.) start accumulating at the domain walls.

These charges create their own electric fields that start to rival and counteract the external field. The result is that the domains just stop moving.

And that is how ferroelectric fatigue sets in.

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