Capacitive-Piezoelectric Transducers for High- $Q$ Micromechanical AlN Resonators

A capacitive-piezoelectric (also known as, capacitive-piezo) transducer that combines the strengths of capacitive and piezoelectric mechanisms to achieve a combination of electromechanical coupling and Q higher than otherwise attainable by either mechanism separately, has allowed demonstration of a 1.2-GHz contour-mode aluminum nitride (AlN) ring resonator with Q > 3000 on par with the highest measured d
₃₁
-transduced AlN-only piezoelectric resonators past 1 GHz, and a 50-MHz disk array with an even higher Q > 12 000. Here, the key innovation is to separate the piezoelectric resonator from its metal electrodes by tiny gaps to eliminate metal material and metal-to-piezoelectric interface losses thought to limit thin-film piezoelectric resonator Q, while also maintaining high electric field strength to preserve a strong piezoelectric effect. While Q increases, electromechanical coupling decreases, but the k
_eff
²
· Q product can still increase overall. More importantly, use of the capacitive-piezo transducer allows a designer to trade electromechanical coupling for Q, providing a very useful method to tailor Q and coupling for narrowband radio frequency (RF) channel-selecting filters for which Q trumps coupling. This capacitive-piezo transducer concept does not require dc-bias voltages and allows for much thicker electrodes that reduce series resistance without mass loading the resonant structure. The latter is especially important as resonators and their supports continue to scale toward even higher frequencies. [2013-0395].