Passive components (resistors, capacitors, and inductors) are (chiefly) ceramic elements used primarily in electronic
filtering applications and to tune microelectronic circuit performance. The ability to embed these components in a
printed circuit board, on a semiconductor chip, or on an optical display would do for passive circuit integration what
the silicon chip did for transistor assemblies, rendering considerable economic value through enhanced product
reliability, reduced cost, improved performance, and smaller form-factor.
At present, these components are individually mounted on the surface of a circuit board because no powder-based processing
technology has been shown to produce components that maintain performance tolerances within 1% of the rated
performance value over standard operating temperatures (-40 °C to +125 °C).
Surface-mounting passive components allows an individual malfunctioning component to be swapped out and reworked should it
fail to meet its rated performance specification. Significantly tighter performance tolerances are required in embedded
circuits since, once buried on an interior layer, the component can no longer be replaced. Thus, the entire value of the
fully assembled is lost if a single embedded passive component fails to operate as specified.
The functional properties of advance ceramics are controlled both by their chemical composition and their microstructure
(grain size). Our proprietary nanotechnology allows advanced ceramics with uniform chemical composition to be laminated
on a material surface and then processed to have very small microstructures. The graph above right shows how the thermal
dependence in the dielectric constant of barium-strontium titanate (BST) changes as a function of its grain-size. BST is
an advanced ceramic used extensively in capacitor and microacoustic applications.
Even though all three forms of the BST ceramic have identical chemical composition, only the ceramic made to a grain size
of 50 nm or less has functional properties that remain constant with temperature. This level of microstructure control
cannot be attained with nanopowder applications at costs that are economically viable on a broad commercial scale since
the act of sintering (fusing) 35-50 nm powders into a consolidated body typically causes the grain structure to grow to
sizes on the order of 0.1 micron.
Frontier NanoSystems, LLC is using this core competency to build fully integrated microelectronic circuits. It
is marketing this product line through "GigaCircuits, Inc.", a subsidiary corporation that has better brand
identification in that specific marketplace.
