Low-Dielectric-Loss Barium Strontium Titanate Thin Films with MgO Buffer Layer for Tunable Microwave Devices

The dielectric and microwave properties of Ba 0.6 Sr 0.4 TiO 3 (BST60) thin films with a MgO buffer layer deposited on Al 2 O 3 substrates were investigated. Insertion of the MgO buffer layer is demonstrated to be an effective approach to fabricate low-dielectric-loss BST thin films. x-Ray pattern analysis indicates that the thin films exhibit good crystalline quality with a pure perovskite phase and that insertion of the MgO buffer layer does not change the crystal structure of BST. The nonlinear dielectric properties of the BST films were measured by using an interdigital capacitor (IDC). At room temperature, the tunability of the BST films with a MgO buffer layer was 24.1% at a frequency of 1 MHz with an applied electric field of 80 kV/cm. The dielectric loss of the BST thin films is only 0.005 to 0.007 in the frequency range from 20 Hz to 2 MHz, the same as for BST films prepared on single-crystal MgO substrates. The microwave dielectric properties of the BST thin films were also measured by a vector network analyzer from 50 MHz to 10 GHz.