AbstractsEngineering

Frequency agile microwave devices based on Barium Strontium Titanate (BST) thin films have gained a lot of interest in recent years. The frequency agility of the ferroelectric devices is based on the external DC electric field controlled permittivity of BST thin film. In this research work, several tunable microwave filters incorporating BST thin film varactors operating in a frequency range between 1 GHz and 25 GHz are designed, tested and analysed. A lumped element lowpass filter incorporating integrated meander line inductors and BST parallel plate capacitors is implemented on a high resistivity silicon substrate and demonstrates 32.1 % tuning of the cut-off frequency at 15 V. A combline bandpass filter employing integrated BST parallel plate varactors as tuning elements is implemented on a MgO substrate and shows a reasonable tuning from about 8 GHz to 12 GHz with 10 V bias of only one resonator. Two pole and four pole coupled resonator bandpass filters with discrete BST or GaAs varactors as tuning elements are implemented in a frequency range of 1 - 3 GHz. The filters based on BST parallel plate capacitors show an insertion loss in line with the GaAs filters, which is also the lowest insertion loss of BST filters ever reported. Future work on improving the BST film and metal film loss at tens of gigahertz range is also discussed.