Transferred Thin Film Lithium Niobate as Millimeter Wave Acoustic Filter Platforms

This paper reports the first high-performance acoustic filters toward millimeter wave (mmWave) bands using transferred single-crystal thin film lithium niobate (LiNbO3). By transferring LiNbO3 on the top of silicon (Si) and sapphire (Al2O3) substrates with an intermediate amorphous Si (aSi) bonding and sacrificial layer, we demonstrate compact acoustic filters with record-breaking performance beyond 20 GHz. In the LN-aSi-Al2O3 platform, the third-order ladder filter exhibits low insertion loss (IL) of 1.62 dB and 3-dB fractional bandwidth (FBW) of 19.8% at 22.1 GHz, while in the LN-aSi-Si platform, the filter shows low IL of 2.38 dB and FBW of 18.2% at 23.5 GHz. Material analysis validates the great crystalline quality of the stacks. The high-resolution x-ray diffraction (HRXRD) shows full width half maximum (FWHM) of 53 arcsec for Al2O3 and 206 arcsec for Si, both remarkably low compared to piezoelectric thin films of similar thickness. The reported results bring the state-of-the-art (SoA) of compact acoustic filters to much higher frequencies, and highlight transferred LiNbO3 as promising platforms for mmWave filters in future wireless front ends.
Comment: 4 pages, 8 figures, accepted by IEEE MEMS 2024