APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS

VOLUME 74, NUMBER 20

17 MAY 1999

Properties of aluminum nitride thin films for piezoelectric transducers

and microwave filter applications
Marc-Alexandre Duboisa) and Paul Muraltb)
Ceramics Laboratory, Dept. of Materials, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 1015 Lausanne,
Switzerland

~Received 21 December 1998; accepted for publication 22 March 1999!

Aluminum nitride thin films have been grown by reactive magnetron sputter technique using a
pulsed power supply. The highly ~002!-textured columnar films deposited on platinized silicon
substrates exhibited quasi-single-crystal piezoelectric properties. The effective d 33 was measured as
3.4 pm/V, the effective e 31 as 1.0 C/m2. The pyroelectric coefficient turned out to be positive ~4.8
mC m22 K21! due to a dominating piezoelectric contribution. Thin-film bulk acoustic resonators
~TFBAR! with fundamental resonance at 3.6 GHz have been fabricated to assess resonator
properties. The material parameters derived from the thickness resonance were a coupling factor
k50.23 and a sound velocity v s 511 400 m/s. With a quality factor Q of 300, the TFBARs proved
to be apt for filter applications. The temperature coefficient of the frequency could be tuned to
practically 0 ppm/K. 1999 American Institute of Physics. @S0003-6951~99!01620-4#

The upcoming needs for higher carrier frequencies in

mobile telecommunication opens the opportunities for bulk
acoustic wave filters based on piezoelectric thin films. Very
convenient film thicknesses of 2.5 down to 0.5 mm would
cover the frequency range from 2 to 10 GHz in the fundamental resonance mode. Bulk acoustic resonances excited by
piezoelectric thin films were demonstrated in the early
1980s.13 In all these works, ZnO was taken as the piezoelectric thin-film material due to its high theoretical coupling
constant of 0.30. However, being a semiconductor, ZnO has
some drawbacks. High electrical resistance, high breakdown
voltages, and low dielectric losses are difficult to achieve.
Aluminum nitride would be a good alternative. With an
achievable coupling constant of 0.25,4 filters with a sufficiently large bandwidth could be produced. As a wide-bandgap material (E g 56.2 eV), a high electrical resistance, a
high breakdown voltage, and low dielectric loss can be expected. Low thermal expansion coefficients may allow to
achieve small thermal drifts. A dielectric constant that is 100
times smaller than the one of Pb~Zr, Ti!O3 thin films makes
AlN also a competitive material for microelectromechanical
systems, in spite of a nine times smaller effective e 31 piezoelectric coefficient. AlN thin films can be expected to be
competitive in sensor, actuator, and ultrasound applications
where low loss, low thermal drift, and high signal-to-noise
ratios are demanded.
AlN has been characterized as a single-crystal epitaxial
film. The published data originate from surface acoustic
wave ~SAW! devices with AlN films grown on sapphire or
silicon.46 For microelectromechanical systems ~MEMS! and
thin-film resonators, a polycrystalline c-axis oriented piezoelectric film is sufficient but it has to be grown on a metallic
electrode. To our knowledge, there is no report on direct
measurements of the piezoelectric coefficient d 33 . Already
in the focus of technologists since many years, the growth of
a!

Electronic mail: marc-alexandre.dubois@epfl.ch

Electronic mail: paul.muralt@epfl.ch

b!

AlN for such applications appeared to be difficult and was

abandoned in most cases in favor of ZnO.7 The scope of this
letter is to fill some of the gaps and present consistent material parameters needed to specify operation in MEMS and in
bulk acoustic wave ~BAW! devices, such as thin-film bulk
acoustic resonators ~TFBAR! and solidly mounted resonators
~SMR!. TFBARs were fabricated to determine the coupling
coefficient and the sound velocity in AlN thin films.
Polycrystalline aluminum nitride thin films were prepared with reactive pulsed direct current ~dc! magnetron
sputtering. The target was a 100 mm diameter 99.999% Al
disk. The system was pumped down to a base pressure
smaller than 731027 Torr before admitting the gas in. The
films were grown at 400 C in 4 mTorr N2 and with a power
of 500 W applied to the target. Passivated silicon coated with
a 10 nm Ta adhesion layer and a 100 nm ~111!-oriented Pt
electrode was used as substrate material. Pt was chosen because the ~111! plane of its cubic structure has an hexagonal
symmetry like the ~002! plane of AlN, and because it is
stable in N2 at the deposition temperature. Extremely well
c-axis oriented films with a columnar microstructure were
obtained.8 To evaluate basic properties, 100 nm of aluminum
were evaporated on a 0.4 mm AlN thin film through a masking metal sheet in order to create round top electrodes with a
diameter of 0.6 mm. The e 31,f piezoelectric coefficient measurement required a special electrode geometry and a special
sample size. For this purpose, the Al top electrode on the
AlN film ~1 mm thick in this case! was patterned by liftoff
technique, and the wafer was then diced into cantilevers of
suitable dimensions (1315 mm). 9
The measured material coefficients are listed in Table I.
An HP-4284A LCR meter was used to measure the dielectric
constant and losses at 10 kHz. The d 33,f piezoelectric coefficient, defined for a thin film clamped on a substrate as
d 33,f 5e 33 /c 33 , was determined at the same frequency with a
double-beam laser interferometer.10 The obtained value is
87% of the single-crystal coefficient of 3.9 pm/V. This reduction could be due to the existence of a few columnar

0003-6951/99/74(20)/3032/3/$15.00
3032
1999 American Institute of Physics
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Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 74, No. 20, 17 May 1999

M.-A. Dubois and P. Muralt

3033

TABLE I. Measured materials coefficients of AlN thin films.

e 33
tan d
d 33.f
e 31.f
p 3f
p x3
p s3

10.460.4
0.002
3.460.17 pm/V
21.0260.04 C/m2
4.860.20 m C/m2 K
20.9 mC/m2 K
21.2 mC/m2 K

grains with an antiparallel polarization. This coefficient was

found to be very independent from the applied ac field ~Fig.
1!, indicating that only the lattice is contributing to d 33,f : A
stable coefficient can thus be expected up to very high frequencies. The error bars plotted on the graph are corresponding to the standard deviation of the different measurements.
The e 31,f 5d 31 /(s 111s 12) piezoelectric transverse coefficient
was measured with the cantilever method.9 The result corresponds to 97% of the value calculated from single-crystal
data.
For the sake of completeness, the pyroelectric coefficient
was also measured, as it may play a role for judging the
temperature stability of a device. In bulk materials, pyroelectric coefficients are either defined for constant strains ~x! as
p x3 5( ] P 3 / ] T) x , or for constant stresses ~s! as p s3
5( ] P 3 / ] T) s . The difference is due to the piezoelectric effect from thermal expansion ( a i ) and can be expressed in
terms of the piezoelectric coefficients e 3i as p s3 2 p x3
52e 31( a 1 1 a 2 )1e 33a 3 . The situation is different in thin
films where the stress equals zero in the direction perpendicular to the film plane, and is varying with temperature in
the film plane. The thermal expansion of the substrate ~coefficient a s ! is in general different from the one of the film
( a f ) and imposes a misfit strain ( a s 2 a f )dT to the film,
creating a piezoelectric contribution to the thin-film pyroelectric coefficient p 3f as follows:11
p 3f 5p s3 12e 31,f ~ a s 2 a f ! .

~1!

The pyroelectric coefficient was measured by the dynamic method12 and yielded p 3f 54.8( m C/m2 K). The positive sign was derived from the sign of the pyroelectric current with respect to the polarization direction. The latter was
figured out from the d 33,f measurement, knowing that the
dilatation is positive if the electric field is parallel to the
polarization. The measured and derived values are given in

FIG. 2. Schematic view of a TFBAR.

Table I. They show that the pyroelectric coefficient of the

AlN ~111! thin film is very small compared to other members of the Wurtzite family ~CdS, ZnO!,11 and that the thinfilm pyroelectricity is mainly due to the piezoelectric contribution.
TFBARs were fabricated on a 100 mm Si wafer coated
on both sides with stress compensated SiO2 and Si3N4 layers.
As a first step, a 0.1 mm Pt/Ta bottom electrode was sputter
deposited and patterned by dry etching. A 1 mm film of AlN
was then deposited with the conditions mentioned above.
Contact windows to the bottom electrodes were wet etched
and 0.1 mm of Al were evaporated and patterned by liftoff as
top electrodes. Finally, windows in the Si3N4 and SiO2 layers
on the backside of the wafer were created and the Si was
etched away through this mask in a KOH solution to create
membranes under the resonators structures. Figure 2 depicts
a cross section of the device.
The S 11 scattering parameter was measured around the
fundamental thickness resonance mode of the TFBARs with
an HP8753D network analyzer. The corresponding admittance Y 5G1iB and Smith chart of such a resonator are
displayed in Figs. 3~a! and 3~b!, respectively. The main resonance is described in the Smith chart by an almost perfect
circle centered on the real axis. The reason for the excitation
of the 3730 MHz spurious mode could be the fact that the
membrane is not flat because of the built-in compressive
stress. A coupling coefficient k of 0.23 was calculated from
the main resonance according to
k 25

p 2 ~ f min2 f max!
,
4 f min

~2!

where f min and f max are the frequencies at minimum and

maximum admittance, respectively. A quality factor of 300
at f min was computed for this resonator. The coupling coefficient of a piezoelectric layer can be expressed in terms of
materials properties by
k 25

e 233,f
c 33e 33e 0

d 233,f c 33

e 33e 0

~3!

The latter relation allowed the extraction of a stiffness

coefficient c 33 of 4.231011 Pa for AlN, which is slightly
higher than the published data for single-crystal (3.95
31011 Pa) 4,13 or polycrystalline films (4.1031011 Pa) 14 but
well within the error boundaries which are estimated to be
610%. The different measurements give thus consistant results.

FIG. 1. d 33,f piezoelectric coefficient as a function of the applied ac electric

field at 10 kHz. The error bars correspond to the standard deviation of the
measurement.
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3034

Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 74, No. 20, 17 May 1999

M.-A. Dubois and P. Muralt

FIG. 4. Temperature coefficient of frequency of a TFBAR with and without

the SiO2 layer of the membrane.

FIG. 3. ~a! Admittance and ~b! Smith chart of a 1 mm thick AlN TFBAR
around its first thickness resonance mode.

The acoustic wave propagation velocity v s in AlN could

be calculated from the reflection condition of a standing
wave in a l/2 layer loaded on both sides by a stack of films.
This condition can be expressed by
e 2i b AlNt AlN5G t G b ,

~4!

where b AlN and t AlN are the wave number and the film thickness, respectively. The reflection coefficients G t and G b of
the top and bottom loads are functions of the thickness, density, and stiffness of the different films. Numerical values of
the latter two parameters for Al, Pt, SiO2, and Si3N4 thin
films were taken from published data.15,16 The stiffness coefficient and the density of single-crystal AlN was used for
the calculation. The velocity extracted from the wave number was v s 511 428 m/s. A value of 11 400 m/s was obtained
after the removal of the SiO2 layer, confirming that the material parameters used for the calculation are consistant.
From v s 5 Ac 33 / r , it can be concluded that the density r of
the film is also close to the single-crystal value.
Measurements of the resonators was performed between
20 and 90 C before and after the removal of the SiO2 layer
of the membrane. The temperature coefficient of frequency
~TCF! was derived for both cases ~Fig. 4!. The SiO2 layer

has a stabilizing effect on the resonance frequency because

its positive TCF is compensating the negative TCF of AlN.2
In conclusion, highly textured AlN thin films with near
single-crystal properties have been obtained on platinized
silicon substrates. A hexagonal and inert electrode seems to
be essential to achieve well oriented films. The film quality is
excellent for the fabrication of bulk acoustic resonators such
as TFBARs and SMRs, which are key components for the
production of high frequency filters. TFBARs working at 3.6
GHz with a very small TCF were fabricated. Their excellent
performances are suitable for production of acoustic filters
for wireless communication devices.
The authors would like to acknowledge support by the
Swiss Priority Program on Materials Research.
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