Thin-Film Ferroelectrics

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Research Focus

Thin-film ferroelectrics is an exciting new field with applications in microwave circuits, semiconductor devices, and optical systems.  Our work is aimed at developing and optimizing aspects of the technology relevant to future commercial application, spanning materials growth and optimization, device design, fabrication and processing, and circuit demonstrations.  Currently our efforts are focused primarily on thin-film Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) for microwave varactor applications.  BST has a large dielectric constant that can be varied by as much as a factor of 4 through an applied field, allowing for voltage-tunable capacitances (varactors).  Low-cost, high performance varactors find numerous applications in microwave circuits, including phase-shifters, voltage-controlled oscillators, tunable filters and matching networks. The BST nonlinearity is fast, making it suitable for frequency conversion devices.   Information on our work is found on this site and also at "Advanced Oxide Thin-Film Technology for Radar and Communications" (summarizing work under DARPA FAME sponsorship).

Research Topics

bulletBST Growth Optimization 
bulletRF Device Design and Processing
bulletVoltage-Controlled Delay Lines (MIM varactors)
bulletVoltage-Controlled Delay Lines (interdigital varactors)
bulletReflection Phase Shifters

General Information

bulletUCSB Sputtering Systems
bulletUCSB Device Characterization
bulletIntroduction to Barium Strontium Titanate
bulletTutorial: Dielectric Films for Dynamic Random Access Memory, Integrated Capacitor Applications,and Tunable High-Frequency Devices
(Part A, Part B, Part C, Part D)

References

A list of UCSB publications relating to thin-film ferroelectrics can be found here.    See individual research topics for further details

Related Work

A short library of papers on this subject is found here.   Also check out the presentations from the IMS2000 Workshop "Ferroelectric Materials and Microwave Applications" hosted on this web site.
 

IEEE Workshop March 2001