Improvements in the figure of merit for tunable microwave dielectrics using combinatorial approach

Ferroelectric/dielectric materials are useful for a variety of different applications. Addition of small amounts of different dopants often dramatically improves the materials performance. The conventional approach to exploring new materials is to make and characterize samples of discrete composition one at a time. In an effort to accelerate this process, we fabricate a combinatorial materials chips containing 256 differently doped (Ba, Sr)TiO3 thin films. From this study, we found that tungsten doping in this class of materials greatly reduces the dielectric loss and does not significantly affect the tunability of these materials. As the result, the overall figures of merit of the materials are greatly improved.