A SAW resonator with two-dimensional reflectors

It is known that a part of the loss of leaky SAW resonators is due to radiation of acoustic energy in the bus-bars. Many researchers are working on so-called phononic crystals. A 2-D grating of very strong reflectors allows these devices to fully reflect, for a given frequency band, any incoming wave. A new device based on the superposition of a regular SAW resonator and a 2-D periodic grating of reflectors is proposed. Several arrangements and geometries of the reflectors were studied and compared experimentally on 48 degrees rotated Y-cut lithium tantalate. In particular, a very narrow aperture (7.5 lambda) resonator was manufactured in the 900 MHz range. Because of its small size, this resonator has a resonance Q of only 575 when using the standard technology, whereas a resonance Q of 1100 was obtained for the new device without degradation of the other characteristics. Because of the narrow aperture, the admittance of the standard resonator showed a very strong parasitic above the resonance frequency, whereas this effect is drastically reduced for the new device. These results demonstrate the feasibility of the new approach.