Barium Titanate Formation for Electronic/Photonic Applications

Integral Wave Technologies (formerly known as Arkansas Microelectronic Development Corporation) proposes to develop a process for growing ferroelectric, polycrystalline barium titinate (BaTiO3) thin-films, by anodic oxidation of co-sputteredbarium-titanium films (BaTi). Though films of this nature find applications in several electrical devices, Integral Wave will utilize this novel technology, if successful, for integral thin-film capacitors and optical waveguides. By utilizing this novelmethod of ferroelectric formation, Integral Wave will be able to obtain thin, uniform ferroelectric films that exhibit dielectric constants from approximately 150 to 1500. This will allow the fabrication of integral thin-film capacitors, which exhibittremendous volume and space saving benefits over traditional discrete capacitors, with very large capacitance densities, from 1¿F/cm2 up to 13¿F/cm2. These values are over 2000 times greater than the value exhibited by the leading commercially availableintegral dielectric. The low loss characteristic of these films will also allow Integral Wave to explore the potential application of this material in optical devices. Crystalline ferroelectrics have also found numerous applications as additional passiveand active optical components, such as couplers, taps, attenuators, modulators, switches and wavelength converters.The main applications are thin-film decoupling capacitors that can either be surface mounted or embedded between layers of a printed circuitboard, or substrate, and optical waveguides. Additional passive and active optical components, such as couplers, taps, attenuators, modulators, switches and wavelength converters, also exist.