Bandpass filters for 8 GHz using solidly mounted bulk acoustic wave resonators

Frequency shift, design, and fabrication issues have been investigated for the realization of 8 GHz bandpass filters based on AlN thin film bulk acoustic wave resonators. Fabrication includes well-textured AIN thin films on Pt (111) electrodes and SiO2/AlN Bragg gratings for the solidly mounted resonators. The chosen ladder filter design requires the tuning of the shunt resonators with respect to the series one. For this purpose, mass loading of the shunt resonators with aluminum (Al) and SiO2 were studied. Design simulations showed that the channel bandwidth can be doubled by shifting more than the difference of resonance and antiresonance frequency. Bandpass filters at 8 GHz were successfully fabricated with -5.5 dB insertion loss, -26 dB out-of-band rejection, 99 MHz (1.2%) +/- 0.2 dB channel bandwidth, and 224 MHz (2.8%) 3 dB bandwidth. The group delay variations within any 30 MHz channel inside the channel bandwidth amounts to < 0.2 ns. Comparisons with simulation calculations and single resonator characteristics show that each pi-section includes a parasitic series resistance and inductance.