Downscaling at submicrometer scale of the gap width of interdigitated Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3 capacitors

The goal of this work was to study the influence of shrinking the gap width between the fingers of interdigitated tunable capacitors (IDCs). Voltage control of the capacitance was achieved with a 500-nm-thick Ba_0.5Sr_0.5TiO₃ film which is in paraelectric state at room temperature. Eight devices with finger spacing ranging from 3 μm down to 0.25 μm were fabricated by the sol-gel deposition technique, electron beam patterning, and gold evaporation. The equivalent capacitance, quality factor, and tunability of the devices were measured subsequently by vector network analysis from 40 MHz to 40 GHz and for a dc bias voltage varying from -30 V to +30 V. This experimental study mainly shows that a decrease of the gap below 1 μm 1) introduces a frequency dependence of the capacitance caused by resonance effects with the finger inductance; 2) degrades the quality factor above 20 GHz, and 3) optimizes the tunability of the devices by enhancing the local electric field values. As a consequence, some trade-offs are pointed out related to the goal of ultra-thin ferroelectric film which can be voltage controlled by means of finger-shaped electrodes with deep submicrometer spacing.