Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-2015

Publication Source

IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices

Abstract

Vanadium dioxide (VO2) is a unique phase change material (PCM) that possesses a metal-to-insulator transition property. Pristine VO2 has a negative temperature coefficient of resistance, and it undergoes an insulator-to-metal phase change at a transition temperature of 68°C. Such a property makes the VO2 thin-film-based variable resistor (varistor) a good candidate in reconfigurable electronics to be integrated with different RF devices such as inductors, varactors, and antennas. Series single-pole single-throw (SPST) switches with integrated VO2 thin films were designed, fabricated, and tested. The overall size of the device is 380 μm × 600 μm. The SPST switches were fabricated on a sapphire substrate with integrated heating coil to control VO2 phase change. During the test, when VO2 thin film changed from insulator at room temperature to metallic state (low-resistive phase) at 80 °C, the insertion loss of the SPST switch wasaddition, the isolation of the SPST improved to better than 30 dB when the temperature dropped to 20 °C. These tunable characteristics of the RF switch provide evidence for VO2 as a useful PCM for of applications in reconfigurable electronics.

Inclusive pages

2959-2965

ISBN/ISSN

0018-9383

Document Version

Postprint

Comments

The document available for download is the authors' accepted manuscript, provided in compliance with IEEE's policy on self-archiving. Permission documentation is on file. Some differences may exist between this version and the published version; as such, those wishing to quite directly from this source are advised to consult the version of record.

Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.

This work was supported by the Air Force Research Laboratory Sensors Directorate through the AFRL Research Collaboration Program under Contract FA8650-13-C-5800.

Publisher

IEEE

Volume

62

Peer Reviewed

yes

Issue

9

Keywords

Coplanar waveguide (CPW), metal–insulator transition (MIT), switch, thin film, vanadium dioxide (VO2), variable resistor (varistor)

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