A novel approach to sintering (Ba,Ca)(Ti,Zr)O3 multilayer ceramic capacitors with Ni electrodes

In this study, a novel sintering technique combining rapid heating and constrained sintering was adopted to fire multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs). It was demonstrated that chamber development can be significantly minimized, leading to a small internal residual stress in MLCCs when they were fired by the novel sintering technique instead of free sintering. The magnitude of tensile stress was closely related to the heating rate and the thickness of the constraining layer. The presence of in-plane tensile stress resulted from the constrained sintering in the x–y plane of the MLCCs, which then modified both the densification rate of the dielectric materials and the inner electrode. The thin inner electrode (<1 μm) with high continuity (>98%) and the fine grain size (1.5 μm) with narrow distribution (±0.10 μm) of BCTZ-based MLCC with a concave-free morphology can be attained by using such a rapid constrained sintering technique when BT is used as a constraining layer laminated on both sides of the multilayer BCTZ-based MLCC.