Study of Tunability of BST With Different Structures for Microwave Applications

Abstract

This paper addresses the characterization of the ferroelectric Ba0.6Sr0.4TiO3 on different substrates using three different microwave components. First, at low frequencies, metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors are used to investigate the variation of the BST dielectric constant and loss tangent for different biasing voltages. BST shows a variation for the dielectric constant from 380 to 130, recording a tunability range of 66 %, and loss tangent of 0.027 to 0.005. In the range of frequency from 1 to 40 GHz, coplanar waveguides (CPW) are used to investigate the effective dielectric constant of BST on four different substrates, HR silicon substrates covered by silicon dioxide, silicon covered by silicon dioxide and silicon nitride, magnesium oxide (MgO (100)), and R-plane sapphire (Al₂O₃) substrate, all covered with 350 nm BST layer. The effective dielectric constant over silicon substrates covered by silica and BST is 7.2, 6.3 for Al₂O₃ substrates and 5.8 for MgO; and for the loss tangent, Al₂O₃ and MgO give about 0.03, while silicon substrates suffer higher values of 0.08 to 0.25. Finally, to study the tunability of microwave structures on the investigated substrates, interdigital capacitors (IDC) are fabricated and measured for different biasing voltages ranging from 0 to 55 V. IDCs over MgO show a tunability of 8.3%, while IDCs over sapphire show 20%.