A series of PbZr0.58Ti0.42O3 (PZT) thin films with various Bi3.25La0.75Ti3O12 (BLT) buffer layer thicknesses were deposited on Pt/TiO2/SiO2/p-Si(100) substrates by RF magnetron sputtering. The X-ray diffraction measurements of PZT film and PZT/BLT multilayered films illustrate that the pure PZT film shows (111) preferential orientation, and the PZT/BLT films show (110) preferential orientation with increasing thickness of the BLT layer. There are no obvious diffraction peaks for the BLT buffer layer in the multilayered films, for interaction effect between the bottom BLT and top PZT films during annealing at the same time. From the surface images of field-emission scanning electron microscope, there are the maximum number of largestsize grains in PZT/BLT(30 nm) film among all the samples. The growth direction and grain size have significant effects on ferroelectric properties of the multilayered films. The fatigue characteristics of PZT and PZT/BLT films suggest that 30-nm-thick BLT is just an effective buffer layer enough to alleviate the accumulation of oxygen vacancies near the PZT/BLT interface. The comparison of these results with that of PZT/Pt/TiO2/SiO2/p-Si(100) basic structured film suggests that the buffer layer with an appropriate thickness can improve the ferroelectric properties of multilayered films greatly. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.