Spurious-Mode Suppression in Sc_0.2Al_0.8N Film Lamb Wave Resonators and Filters with Arc-Shaped Apodization

Lamb wave devices have the advantage of monolithic multi-frequency integration and show great application potential in mobile communications. However, their performance is often limited by spurious modes. In this work, an arc-shaped apodization electrode structure is proposed to suppress spurious modes in Sc_0.2Al_0.8N Lamb wave resonators (LWRs). By shortening the overlap length of the interdigital transducer electrodes at the edges, the energy coupling in the spurious-mode regions is reduced while the main-mode region is largely preserved. Finite element method (FEM) simulations confirm the suppression of spurious responses near the anti-resonant frequency. Based on the optimized design, typical and arc-shaped apodization LWRs and filters were fabricated. The fabricated arc-shaped apodization LWR exhibits an effective electromechanical coupling coefficient (keff2) of 3.9%. The corresponding filter operates at a center frequency of 1.774 GHz, with a -3 dB bandwidth of 20 MHz and a minimum insertion loss of 4.50 dB. Compared with the typical filter fabricated on the same wafer, the insertion loss is reduced by 1.22 dB. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed electrode apodization scheme for suppressing spurious modes in Sc_0.2Al_0.8N Lamb wave devices.