13 GHz Acoustic Resonator with Q of 600 in High-Quality Thin-Film Aluminum Nitride

This study reports a high-quality thin-film aluminum nitride (AlN) acoustic Lamb wave resonator (LWR) with a compact size and low-loss operation. The device is composed of 60 nm thick Al electrodes on the top of 200 nm thick plasma vapor deposition (PVD) AlN film. The design and stack of the resonator are selected for leveraging of Ku-band operation (12-18 GHz) with top electrodes of wavelengths (λ, 0.5-0.8 µm). Specifically, λ of 0.8 µm implements a 13.0 GHz resonator with a record-breaking Q<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">p_3dB</inf> of 600, enabled by fundamental symmetric (S0) mode surpassing prior works. The results highlight the potential for the effectiveness of the new stack and optimized resonator design in Ku-band. Further study will be focused on identifying and minimizing the dominant loss.