Journal of the American Ceramic Society, Vol.99, No.5, 1676-1680, 2016
Bismuth Zinc Niobate Thin Film Multilayer Capacitors with Cu Electrodes Fabricated at Low Temperature by RF Magnetron Sputtering
Thin film multilayer capacitors (MLCs) composed of amorphous Bi1.5Zn1.0Nb1.5O7 (BZN) dielectric layers with Cu internal electrodes were fabricated by radio-frequency magnetron sputtering at a temperature below 150 degrees C. Both BZN thin films and Cu internal electrodes were deposited in situ through a set of steel shadow masks at room temperature and postannealed at 150 degrees C. The BZN dielectric layers used in the MLCs are amorphous and the thickness for each BZN layer is approximately 220 nm. Metallic Cu layer used as the internal electrode is about 50 nm thick. Auger electron spectroscopy analysis indicates that there are no diffusion between BZN films and Cu electrodes, as well as no oxidation of Cu electrodes during the fabrication process owing to room-temperature deposition and low-temperature postannealing (150 degrees C). The thin film MLCs with different number of BZN layers were fabricated. The thin film MLCs with five BZN layers exhibit promising properties with dielectric constant of 72, capacitance density of 1600 nF/cm(2), and loss tangent of 5.4% at 10 kHz. These results suggest that the BZN thin film MLCs have potential applications for the embedded PCBs.