Dielectrics films are widely used as insulating materials and functional materials

and the distribution of space charge is their important feature parameters under high voltage application. As functional dielectric films

the space charge distribution can affect the external characteristics of the functional devices. In this paper

we summarize the research progress of non-destructive measurement of space charge distribution in dielectrics films with the thickness of several nanometers to dozens of micrometers. According to the achieving spatial resolution of the measuring technologies

we introduce

respectively

the measurement methods including pressure wave propagation method

thermal perturbation method

electro-acoustic reflection method

femtosecond pulse laser based high space resolution measurements

and the related data processing algorithms. The characteristics of these measurement methods are compared

and several key factors affecting the measurement resolution are discussed as follows: the disturbance mode to the dielectrics films

the detection mode to the dielectric response signal

and the deconvolution method for the response signal processing. Pressure wave method and thermal disturbance method are relative mature and effective measurement method

of which their resolutions are between sub-micron and several microns. The disturbance and the response signal monitoring are relatively easy to achieve. The thermal disturbance method is easier to achieve sub-micron resolution

but the data processing is more tedious. The measurement of electro-acoustic reflection method is based on network analyzer and has micrometer spatial resolution. The photoelectric measurement method based on femtosecond pulse laser disturbance is considered to be an improvement of the traditional pressure wave method or pulsed electro-acoustic method. The ultra-high bandwidth measurement is realized by means of THz pulse disturbance

and the spatial resolution of tens of nanometers has been achieved.