Surface acoustic wave devices fabricated on epitaxial AlN film

Abstract

This paper reports surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices fabricated on AlN epitaxial film grown on sapphire, aiming to avoid the detrimental polarization axis inconsistency and refrained crystalline quality of the normally used polycrystalline AlN films. Devices with center frequency of 357 MHz and 714 MHz have been fabricated. The stop band rejection ratio of the as-obtained device reaches 24.5 dB and the pass band ripple is profoundly smaller compared to most of the reported AlN SAW devices with the similar configuration. Judging from the rather high edge dislocation level of the film used in this study, the properties of the SAW devices have great potential to be improved by further improving the crystalline quality of the film. It is then concluded that the AlN epitaxial film is favorable for high quality SAW devices to meet the high frequency and low power consumption challenges facing the signal processing components.