Abstract-In this letter, BaSrTiO 3 (BST) interdigitated capacitors on sapphire substrates have been investigated. The tunability and quality factor of interdigital capacitors has been optimized for microwave and millimeter wave applications. A monolithic K-band phase shifter circuit that employs voltage tunable BaSrTiO 3 (BST) interdigitated capacitors is presented here. Index Terms-BaSrTiO 3 , distributed phase shifter, interdigital

Erich G Erker

James Speck

Member, IEEE Amit S Nagra

Padmini Periaswamy

Senior Member, IEEE Robert A York

Troy R Taylor

Yu Liu

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448 IEEE MICROWAVE AND GUIDED WAVE LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2000
BaSrTiO3 Interdigitated Capacitors for Distributed
Phase Shifter Applications
Yu Liu, Amit S. Nagra, Member, IEEE, Erich G. Erker, Padmini Periaswamy, Troy R. Taylor, James Speck, and
Robert A. York, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—In this letter, BaSrTiO 3 (BST) interdigitated capaci-
tors on sapphire substrates have been investigated. The tunability
and quality factor of interdigital capacitors has been optimized for
microwave and millimeter wave applications. A monolithic K-band
phase shifter circuit that employs voltage tunable BaSrTiO3 (BST)
interdigitated capacitors is presented here.
Index Terms—BaSrTiO3, distributed phase shifter, interdigital.
I. INTRODUCTION
M ODERN phased array antenna systems require low loss,low cost microwave phase shifters. Phase shifters using
Barium Strontium Titanate (BaSr TiO ), which has high
tunability, low loss tangent and high power handling capability,
are very promising as a replacement for traditional ferrite and
semiconductor devices phase shifters. Several groups are inves-
tigating the possibility of implementing phase shifter circuits
using barium strontium titanate (BST). Among recent demon-
strations, ferroelectric material (BST) either forms the entire
microwave substrate [1], [2] on which the conductors are de-
posited (thick films/bulk crystals) or a fraction of the substrate
with thin BST films sandwiched between the substrate and con-
ductors [3]–[5]. These approaches result in either inefficient use
of ferroelectric materials or high conductor losses. Distributed
phase shifter, compared with other types of phase shifters, has
the advantage of true time delay which is required for phased
array antenna applications. Distributed phase shifters consisting
of coplanar waveguide lines that are periodically loaded with
BST parallel plate varactors have been implemented and showed
/dB performance [6]. The main limitation in this approach
is that the quality factor of BST parallel plate capacitors is quite
low (dominated by series resistance in electrodes). To further re-
duce insertion loss interdigitated BST capacitors were used as
replacements for parallel plate BST capacitors in periodically
loaded phase shifter circuits. In addition to lower losses, phase
shifters using interdigitated BST capacitors also have the addi-
tional advantage of being easier to fabricate.
In this paper, BST interdigitated capacitors have been de-
signed and characterized for microwave and millimeter-wave
applications. The BST film thickness, finger width and spacing
Manuscript received July 11, 2000; revised September 27, 2000. This work
was supported by DARPA under the FAME program (Grant 442530–23146).
Y. Liu, A. S. Nagra, E. G. Erker, P. Periaswamy, and R. A. York are with
the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, University of California,
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA (e-mail: yuliu@scully.ece.ucsb.edu).
T. R. Taylor and J. Speck are with the Materials Department, University of
California, Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA.
Publisher Item Identifier S 1051-8207(00)10938-9.
Fig. 1. Schematic of BST interdigitated capacitor for the static field analysis.
were optimized to achieve maximum tunability. The optimized
capacitor showed 1.75 : 1 tunability and quality factor larger
than 20 up to 24 GHz. Distributed analog phase shifters peri-
odically loaded with these optimized BST interdigitated capac-
itors were fabricated and tested at 20 GHz. The phase shifters
reported here had a figure of merit of 32/dB at 20 GHz, which
is very promising.
II. CHARACTERIZATION
Static field analysis was used to analyze the capacitance and
tunability of BST interdigitated capacitors. Adjacent fingers are
considered to be at a potential of and so that the
plane of symmetry between the two fingers can be replaced with
a perfect electric conductor. Fig. 1 shows the section used to
make the static field analysis. As shown in Fig. 1, the finger
width is , the finger spacing is, BST thin film thickness is
and the substrate thickness is. Poisson’s equation was ap-
plied to each layer. By meeting the boundary conditions between
consecutive layers the amount of chargeon the finger can be
determined as a function of applied dc bias. Interdigitated ca-
pacitor can be modeled as parallel resistor-capacitor, then the
capacitance can be easily determined.
An important goal was to maximize the tunability of the
BST interdigitated capacitor. Several structures were inves-
tigated. While the above simulation shows that increasing
ferroelectric thin film thickness could increase the tunability,
1051–8207/00$10.00 © 2000 IEEE
LIU et al.: BaSrTiO INTERDIGITATED CAPACITORS 449
(a)
(b)
Fig. 2. (a) Capacitance versus dc control bias for 1) finger width= 2 m,
spacing= 1 m; 2) finger width= 2 m, spacing= 2 m. (b) Quality factor
versus frequency.
Fig. 3. S andS of BST interdigitated capacitor loaded distributed phase
shifter at 0 V, 40 V, and 100 V dc bias.
it also increases dielectric loss. Fig. 2(a) shows the measured
capacitance variation as a function of dc bias for two capacitor
structures on a 100 nm BST sample. From the plot it can be seen
that the capacitor with spacing 1m can effectively tune the
capacitance from 7 pF at 0 V dc bias to 3.8 pF at 90 V dc bias
(tunability of 1.75 : 1). The capacitor with spacing 2m has
much lower tunability because the dc bias is not large enough
to tune the capacitor effectively. Since the dielectric constant of
BST is controlled by the electric field inside the material, with
the same dc bias, the electric field in the thin film with spacing
2 m will be much lower than the one with spacing 1m. To
further reduce required dc bias, we could shrink the spacing
between adjacent fingers to as small as possible.
The motivation for using interdigital structures was its inher-
ently high- value and ease of processing. So it was essential
to characterize the quality factor of BST interdigitated capaci-
tors. Characterization was made by one-port reflection measure-
ments on a HP 8722D network analyzer with on-wafer open and
short calibration. The measured-parameters were then used to
extract the quality factor and the capacitance value. Fig. 2(b)
shows the quality factor of a BST interdigitated capacitor with
100nm BST film thickness, 2m finger width and 1 m finger
spacing. The quality factor is larger than 20 from 0 to 24 GHz.
This, in addition to the high tunability, made it possible to use
BST interdigitated capacitors in microwave phase shifter cir-
cuits.
III. D ISTRIBUTED PHASE SHIFTER DESIGN
The distributed phase shifter circuit is comprised of a high
impedance ( ) transmission line periodically loaded with
voltage variable capacitors ( ) with spacing . Using
the proper design technique [7], the synthetic transmission line
can have maximum phase shift with lowest possible insertion
loss while maintaining good matching at the input port. The
operating frequency for the phase shifter presented here was
designed to be 20 GHz. The Bragg frequency for the periodi-
cally loaded line was chosen to be 40 GHz. For the design of
the interdigital capacitors, a BST thin film thickness of 100
nm, finger width of 2 m and finger spacing of 1m was used.
The zero bias capacitance of each interdigitated capacitor used
in the design was 82 fF. Due to symmetry considerations, the
capacitor was divided in half (41 fF each) and connected in
parallel from the center CPW line to each ground pad. The
circuit was fabricated on sapphire (-axis orientation) using
standard monolithic fabrication techniques. BST for the tunable
capacitors was deposited by RF magnetron sputtering and 4000
Å thick gold was evaporated on BST to make the interdigital
pattern. The BST in the capacitor active region was covered
by photoresist and BST film elsewhere was etched away by
buffered hydrofluoric acid. Finally, 1.5m gold was deposited
as the coplanar transmission line.
RF measurements were made on a HP8722D network ana-
lyzer that was calibrated using on-wafer standards. The two-port
-parameters of the phase shifter circuit were recorded up to 35
GHz. Fig. 3 shows the return loss and insertion loss of the phase
shifter circuit at 0 V, 40 V and 100 V dc biases. Fig. 4 shows
the differential phase shift (with respect to the zero bias inser-
tion phase) as a function of frequency for dc biases at 40 V and
100 V. The circuit shows 0–110phase shifts at 20 GHz with a
maximum insertion loss of 3.4 dB. The return loss is less than
dB over all phase states.
IV. CONCLUSION
BaSrTiO interdigitated capacitors have been investigated
and their design has been optimized for high tunability and
450 IEEE MICROWAVE AND GUIDED WAVE LETTERS, VOL. 10, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2000
Fig. 4. Differential phase shift at 40 V and 100 V dc control bias.
large quality factor. A monolithic K-band phase shifter circuit
that employs voltage tunable BaSrTiO3 interdigitated capaci-
tors has been designed, tested and fabricated. The phase shifter
demonstrated continuous phase shift from 0 to 110at 20 GHz
with a maximum insertion loss of 3.4 dB. The phase shifter
performance will benefit strongly from the ongoing efforts to
further improve the tunability and quality factor of the BST
interdigitated capacitors.
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BaSrTiO 3 Interdigitated Capacitors for Distributed Phase Shifter Applications

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BaSrTiO 3 Interdigitated Capacitors for Distributed Phase Shifter Applications

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