Nanosheet Lithium Niobate Acoustic Resonator for mmWave Frequencies
Kai Yang, Fuhong Lin, Jiming Fang, Jie Chen, Haoran Tao, Haiding Sun, Chengjie Zuo
Abstract
As wireless communication evolves into millimeter wave (mmWave) frequencies, it becomes extremely challenging to realize compact and integrated radio frequency (RF) front-end components with wide bandwidth and high energy efficiency. Here we propose a new fin-mounted acoustic resonator design based on nanosheet (thickness < 100 nm) Z-cut single-crystal lithium niobate (LiNbO3) thin film for large-bandwidth filtering applications in the 5G NR Frequency Range 2 (FR2) band. The fabricated fin-mounted acoustic resonator operating at 25.03 GHz exhibits a high electromechanical coupling coefficient ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${k}^{{2}}{)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 16% and quality factor ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${Q}_{p}{)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> of 132 at parallel resonant frequency (without any de-embedding), which achieves the highest Figure of Merit (FoM = <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${k}^{{2}} \times {Q}{)}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> in the 5G FR2 band among all reported resonators to date. This demonstration provides a new solution to the internal stress problem of nanosheet piezoelectric thin film devices and opens up more possibilities in enabling piezoelectric nanostructures for filtering, sensing, and timing applications.