Effects of Thermal Annealing on the Characteristics of High Frequency FBAR Devices

Abstract

In this study, piezoelectric zinc oxide (ZnO) thin film was deposited on the Pt/Ti/SiNx/Si substrate to construct the FBAR device. The Pt/Ti multilayers were deposited on SiNx/Si as the bottom electrode and the Al thin film was deposited on the ZnO piezoelectric layer as the top electrode by a DC sputtering system. The ZnO thin film was deposited onto the Pt thin film by a radio frequency (RF) magnetron sputtering system. The cavity on back side for acoustic reflection of the FBAR device was achieved by KOH solution and reactive ion etching (RIE) processes. The crystalline structures and surface morphologies of the films were analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD) and field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM). The optimized as-deposited ZnO thin films with preferred (002)-orientation were obtained under the sputtering power of 80 W and sputtering pressure of 20 mTorr. The crystalline characteristics of ZnO thin films and the frequency responses of the FBAR devices can be improved by using the rapid thermal annealing (RTA) process. The optimized annealing temperature and annealing time are 400 °C and 10 min, respectively. Finally, the FBAR devices with structure of Al/ZnO/Pt/Ti/SiNx/Si were fabricated. The frequency responses showed that the return loss of the FBAR device with RTA annealing was improved from −24.07 to −34.66 dB, and the electromechanical coupling coefficient (kt2) was improved from 1.73% to 3.02% with the resonance frequency of around 3.4 GHz.