A tunable ferroelectric based unreleased RF resonator

TL;DR

This paper presents the first tunable ferroelectric capacitor-based unreleased RF MEMS resonator integrated in CMOS technology, achieving high Q and switchable resonance for potential on-chip timing and sensing applications.

Contribution

Introduction of a novel ferroelectric capacitor-based RF resonator with high Q, tunability, and switchability within standard CMOS processes.

Findings

Resonance at 703 MHz with Q of 1012

Achieved a fQ product of 7.11×10^11, surpassing previous PZT resonators

Resonance can be switched off at ±0.3V due to ferroelectric properties

Abstract

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$\times$10$^1$$^1$ which is 1.6$\times$ higher than the most state-of-the-art Pb(Zr,Ti)O$_3$ (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 $\pm$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.