Periodically poled aluminum scandium nitride bulk acoustic wave resonators and filters for communications in the 6G era.

ABSTRACT: Bulk Acoustic Wave (BAW) filters find applications in radio frequency (RF) communication systems for Wi-Fi, 3G, 4G, and 5G networks. In the beyond-5G (potential 6G) era, high-frequency bands (>8 GHz) are expected to require resonators with high-quality factor (Q) and electromechanical coupling ( kt2 ) to form filters with low insertion loss and high selectivity. However, both the Q and kt2 of resonator devices formed in traditional uniform polarization piezoelectric films of aluminum nitride (AlN) and aluminum scandium nitride (AlScN) decrease when scaled beyond 8 GHz. In this work, we utilized 4-layer AlScN periodically poled piezoelectric films (P3F) to construct high-frequency (~17-18 GHz) resonators and filters. The resonator performance is studied over a range of device geometries, with the best resonator achieving a kt2 of 11.8% and a Qp of 236.6 at the parallel resonance frequency ( fp ) of 17.9 GHz. These resulting figures-of-merit are ( FoM1=kt2Qp and FoM2=fpFoM1×10-9 ) 27.9 and 500, respectively. These and the kt2 are significantly higher than previously reported AlN/AlScN-based resonators operating at similar frequencies. Fabricated 3-element and 6-element filters formed from these resonators demonstrated low insertion losses (IL) of 1.86 and 3.25 dB, and -3 dB bandwidths (BW) of 680 MHz (fractional BW of 3.9%) and 590 MHz (fractional BW of 3.3%) at a ~17.4 GHz center frequency. The 3-element and 6-element filters achieved excellent linearity with in-band input third-order intercept point (IIP3) values of +36 and +40 dBm, respectively, which are significantly higher than previously reported acoustic filters operating at similar frequencies.

SUBMITTER: Izhar 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11754792 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature