Oxide materials for electronics show recently significant progress. Among the most interesting are oxide composite heterostructures made of thin films. They are taking advantage of integration, anisotropy and synergetic concepts leading to new types of devices and functionalities. Remarkable is that, in the last few years, new devices and artificial materials showing new phenomena were demonstrated. At the same time, their synthesis, processing or fabrication is very often by complex, sophisticated, and, hence, by expensive methods. For further industrial implementation, deep understanding of the growth principles and concepts is required. On a higher level, understanding of the bi-directional relationship between the general and particular principles becomes important and deserves much attention. The immediate benefit is that knowledge on growth for one material can be transferred to another one. This may lead for search of less expensive but optimum technological approaches and can also lead to generation of new materials and devices. In our work we have analyzed the relationship between the particular and general growth principles for some oxide multicomponent perovskites. Materials used in our examples are Bi-Sr-Ca-Cu-O and YBa2Cu3O7, (Ca, Sr)CuO2, (Ca, Ba)CuO2 and Bi4Ti3O12. Presented thin films or heterostructures are with c-axis and non-c-axis orientations. We discuss and we review based on our results film-substrate lattice relationships, principles to control the growth mechanism, the morphology/roughness, the uniformity, and the stability domain and inter diffusion aspects.

The crystal structure of thermoelectric rhenium silicide with an ordered arrangement of vacancies is investigated by utilizing spherical aberration (Cs) corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) combined with synchrotron X-ray diffraction and conventional transmission electron microscopy. By STEM Cs corrected imaging, we can clearly observe Si vacancies in rhenium silicide, which is impossible without Cs correction. In addition, significantly reduced contrast levels are noted in STEM images for particular Si sites near vacancies. From the STEM image simulation, the reduced contrast levels are concluded to be due to anomalously large local thermal vibration of these Si atoms. The crystal structure of rhenium silicide can be successfully refined by the synchrotron X-ray diffraction starting with the deduced structure model from the STEM images and the occurrence of large local thermal vibration can be qualitatively confirmed. Furthermore, we confirm the validity of the refined crystal structure of rhenium silicide by comparing experimental images with simulated image generating with the refined crystal structure parameters.