Low-Temperature Sintering of Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3-SrMoO4 Dielectric Tunable Composite Ceramics for LTCC Applications

A sintering-aid system using melting of B-Li glass for barium strontium titanate (BST)-based compositions to be used in low-temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) layers is introduced. The effects of the sintering aid on the microstructure, dielectric properties, and application in LTCC were investigated. The composition Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3-SrMoO4 with 3 wt.% B-Li glass sintered at 950°C exhibits optimized dielectric properties, including low dielectric constant (368), low dielectric loss (0.007), and moderate tunability (13%, 60 kV/cm) at 10 kHz. At 1.44 GHz, it possesses a dielectric constant of 218 and Q value of 230. LTCC multilayer ceramic capacitors fabricated by the tape-casting process have steady relative tunability of 12% at 300 V, suggesting that BST50-SrMoO4-B-Li glass composite ceramic is a promising candidate for electrically tunable LTCC microwave device applications.