With the rapid commercialization of fifth generation (5G) technology in the world, the market demand for radio frequency (RF) filters continues to grow. Acoustic wave technology has been attracting great attention as one of the effective solutions for achieving high-performance RF filter operations while offering low cost and small device size. Compared with surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonators, bulk acoustic wave (BAW) resonators have more potential in fabricating high- quality RF filters because of their lower insertion loss and better selectivity in the middle and high frequency bands above 2.5 GHz. Here, we provide a comprehensive review about BAW resonator researches, including materials, structure designs, and characteristics. The basic principles and details of recently proposed BAW resonators are carefully investigated. The materials of poly-crystalline aluminum nitride (AlN), single crystal AlN, doped AlN, and electrode are also analyzed and compared. Common approaches to enhance the performance of BAW resonators, suppression of spurious mode, low temperature sensitivity, and tuning ability are introduced with discussions and suggestions for further improvement. Finally, by looking into the challenges of high frequency, wide bandwidth, miniaturization, and high power level, we provide clues to specific materials, structure designs, and RF integration technologies for BAW resonators.

Bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters have been extensively used in consumer products for mobile communication systems due to their high performance and standard complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) compatible integration process. However, it is challenging for a traditional aluminum nitride (AlN)-based BAW filter to meet several allocated 5G bands with more than a 5% fractional bandwidth via an acoustic-only approach. In this work, we propose an Al_0.8Sc_0.2N-based film bulk acoustic wave resonator (FBAR) for the design of radio frequency (RF) filters. By taking advantage of a high-quality Al_0.8Sc_0.2N thin film, the fabricated resonators demonstrate a large K_eff² of 14.5% and an excellent figure of merit (FOM) up to 62. The temperature coefficient of frequency (TCF) of the proposed resonator is measured to be −19.2 ppm/°C, indicating excellent temperature stability. The fabricated filter has a center frequency of 4.24 GHz, a −3 dB bandwidth of 215 MHz, a small insertion loss (IL) of 1.881 dB, and a rejection >32 dB. This work paves the way for the realization of wideband acoustic filters operating in the 5G band.

This letter reports an aluminium nitride (AlN)based micromechanical resonator with high-effective coupling coefficient (k ² _eff ) and low insertion loss (IL), which are comparable with those of Film Bulk Acoustic Resonators (FBARs). The in-house-fabricated resonator comprises of lithographically patterned top and bottom molybdenum interdigitated electrode fingers and a layer of 1-μm-thick AlN sandwiched in between. Synergetic inter-mode coupling between the constituent thickness mode and the lateral mode can be realized within a wide frequency range, which can be treated as a subcategory of degenerated cross-sectional Lamé mode, enabling the capability of lithographic tuning of resonant frequency yet not compromising k ² _eff . Measurement results show that the designed 2.3-GHz resonator achieves a k ² _eff of 6.34% and an IL of 0.26 dB upon direct connection to a network with 50-Ω termination, making it a promising candidate for Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and high band Long Term Evolution (LTE) band selection filtering applications.

In this article, we present a high-performance aluminum nitride (AlN)-based microelectromechanical system (MEMS) hydrophone sensor, in which the sensing cells are designed and arranged as an innovative honeycomb architecture for achieving large acoustic pressure sensitivity and high fill-factor. An 8×9 array of 360 μm in characteristic size, 0.92-MHz MEMS hydrophone sensor is developed based on an AlN-on-cavity silicon-on-insulator (CSOI) platform. The size of the MEMS hydrophone sensor is 3.2 mm ×3.2 mm. The MEMS hydrophone sensor and its preamplification circuit are integrated on a printed circuit board and packaged together with an acoustically transparent material, in order to meet the stringent requirements of underwater applications. The packaged MEMS hydrophone is fully characterized through using an industry-standard hydrophone calibration instrument. The MEMS hydrophone achieves an acoustic pressure sensitivity of -178 dB (re: 1 V/ μ Pa), with a maximum nonlinearity of 0.1%, and a noise resolution of 58.7 dB (re: 1 μPa/Hz). The measurement results show that the reported MEMS hydrophone sensor with bioinspired honeycomb structure is compared favorable with advanced commercially available bulky hydrophones.

This letter reports the first implementation of a new class of laterally coupled alternating thickness (LCAT) mode resonators operating above 2 GHz, realised by replacing the bottom interdigitated electrodes of the conventional LCAT mode resonator with an electrically floating plate. Besides saving one mask process and relaxing the tight resolution and alignment requirements for defining small features, the flat unpatterned bottom electrode metal is also more favorable for the growth of highly oriented piezoelectric thin film, which results in an improved resonator quality factor (Q). A group of 8% scandium doped aluminium nitride-based modified LCAT mode resonators with frequency difference over 100 MHz by varying the top interdigitated electrode pitches are fabricated achieving coupling coefficient (k _eff ² ) of up to 6.45% and figure of merit of up to 54, making them promising candidates for integrated band selection filter banks.