Improved electrodes for low-loss radio frequency devices

Understanding and minimizing RF loss in tunable components is key to the successful integration of this technology in high performance wireless devices. Filter applications, in particular, fundamentally require extremely low loss to operate efficiently. Agile’s high-frequency tunable filter development efforts using BST have found that loss due to surface or series resistance (Rs) is a significant limitation. Both Rs and the device quality factor (Q), another common metric for RF loss, can be strongly affected by electrode materials, the electrode/oxide interfaces, and the thickness and geometry of the electrodes. This proposal aims at investigating RF loss mechanisms specifically in BST-based devices which are being developed at Agile for commercial and DoD wireless applications.