VHF and UHF Lithium Niobate MEMS Resonators Exceeding 30 dB of Passive Gain
Luca Colombo, Mary E. Galanko Klemash, Tobias Kiebala, Sarah S. Bedair, Gianluca Piazza, Matteo Rinaldi
Abstract
This letter reports on the passive voltage amplification provided by X-cut Lithium Niobate (LN) <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">${S}_{{0}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> mode resonators when implemented as Matching Networks (MN) in the front-end of ultra-low-power, Internet of Things (IoT) receivers. In the first section, a simple gain analytical model is described. In the second part, devices design rules and geometries are disclosed. In the third and last section, measurements methodology and results are presented. Measured gains of 38.9 dB and 32.5 dB are reported at 110 and 570 MHz, respectively, for a capacitive load of ~100 fF. These performance represent, to the knowledge of the authors, the largest passive voltage gains ever recorded at the given frequencies for MEMS-based matching networks.