I.H.P. SAW technology and its application to microacoustic components (Invited)

Various characteristics for RF filters in mobile terminals are required corresponding to expansion of mobile terminals. I.H.P. SAW (Incredible High-performance SAW) with high Q and temperature stability has been developed to resolve these challenges. In this paper, its high Q mechanism of the new multi-layered structure (LiTaO
₃
/ SiO
₂
/ AlN / Si substrate) has been studied numerically in terms of acoustic energy confinement by using wave propagation analysis in real-space and wavenumber domains. One-port resonators employing I.H.P. SAW were fabricated after optimizing the multi-layered structure. Experimental results show higher Bode-Q values over 6000 at 0.9 GHz to 1900 at 3.5GHz successfully, which are over 3 times higher than those of conventional 42YX-LT SAW resonators. Very small TCF of -8 ppm/°C is also realized, and wider bandwidth and superior heat dissipation performance have been achieved. A new Wi-Fi filter with very narrow adjacent gaps and a new Band 25 / 66 / 30 hexaplexer, one of the most difficult multiplexers, have been developed using I.H.P. SAW technology, which show low insertion loss, steep cut-off, deep attenuation and extremely high isolation characteristics.