2019/05/15 by Yanbo He, Bichoy Bahr, He, Yanbo +8 · 1 citation
Engineering · Materials Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Acoustic Wave Resonator Technologies #Advanced MEMS and NEMS Technologies #Applied Physics (physics.app-ph) #Back end of line #CMOS #Capacitor #Dielectric #Electrical engineering #Engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Ferroelectric RAM #Ferroelectric and Piezoelectric Materials #Ferroelectric capacitor #Ferroelectricity #Materials science #Microelectromechanical systems #Optoelectronics #Radio frequency #Resonator #Voltage #physics.app-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1905.05903
published in arXiv (Cornell University) (Cornell University) · 14 pages, 7 figures
arxiv created 2019/05/15 · openalex publication_date 2019/05/15 · arxiv updated 2019/05/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
This paper introduces the first tunable ferroelectric capacitor (FeCAP) based unreleased RF MEMS resonator, integrated seamlessly in Texas Instruments' 130nm Ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM) technology. An array of FeCAPs in this complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) technology's back-end-of-line (BEOL) process were used to define the acoustic resonance cavity as well as the electromechanical transducers. To achieve high quality factor (Q) of the resonator, acoustic waveguiding for vertical confinement within the CMOS stack is studied and optimized. Additional design considerations are discussed to obtain lateral confinement and suppression of spurious modes. An FeCAP resonator is demonstrated with fundamental resonance at 703 MHz and Q of 1012. This gives a frequency quality factor product fQ = 7.11×1011 which is 1.6× higher than the most state-of-the-art Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (PZT) resonators. Due to the ferroelectric characteristics of the FeCAPs, transduction of the resonator can be switched on and off by adjusting the electric polarization. In this case, the resonance can be turned off completely at ±0.3V corresponding to the coercive voltage of the constituent FeCAP transducers. These novel switchable resonators may have promising applications in on-chip timing, ad-hoc radio front ends, and chip-scale sensors.