The first phase of this project has now con­clud­ed suc­cess­ful­ly, demon­strat­ing sig­nif­i­cant improve­ments over the pre­vi­ous gen­er­a­tion of dielec­tric stacks. The new stack, based on zir­co­ni­um oxide, will be inte­grat­ed into future gen­er­a­tions of CNF-MIM capac­i­tors. The pri­or stack, made from hafni­um oxide, was uti­lized in the Gen Zero capac­i­tors.

The new­ly devel­oped dielec­tric stack is a blend of two oxides: a high‑k oxide to boost capac­i­tance den­si­ty, and an oxide that serves as a bar­ri­er against charge move­ment, thus min­i­miz­ing cur­rent leakage.

Farzan Gha­vani­ni, CTO at Smoltek.

Dur­ing the first phase, Smoltek Semi focused on par­al­lel plate capac­i­tors, deposit­ing the dielec­tric stack on flat sur­faces between two par­al­lel elec­trodes. Per­for­mance mea­sure­ments were car­ried out at the wafer lev­el and after the devices were trans­ferred and mount­ed onto PCBs. The results revealed an extra­or­di­nary 230% improve­ment in capac­i­tance den­si­ty com­pared to the Gen Zero dielec­tric stack, while anoth­er crit­i­cal per­for­mance met­ric, leak­age cur­rent, showed a 50% reduction.

The results have been out­stand­ing, both in terms of per­for­mance met­rics and repro­ducibil­i­ty. I’m par­tic­u­lar­ly excit­ed about the excep­tion­al repro­ducibil­i­ty achieved dur­ing the first phase, where we reached a fab­ri­ca­tion yield of 100%.

Farzan Gha­vani­ni

The devices mount­ed on PCBs have now been sent to Yageo who is sup­port­ing Smoltek with reli­a­bil­i­ty test­ing and fur­ther characterization.