Biblio

The fingerprint sensor based on pMUTs was reported [1]. Spatial resolution of the image depends on the size of the acoustic source when a plane wave is used. If the size of the acoustic source is smaller, piezoelectric films with high dielectric constant are required. In this study, in order to obtain small acoustic source, we proposed Pb(Zrx Th-x)O3 (PZT) epitaxial transducers with high dielectric constant. PbTiO3 (PTO) epitaxial films were grown on conductive La-SrTiO3 (STO) substrate by RF magnetron sputtering. Longitudinal wave conversion loss of PTO transducers was measured by a network analyzer. The thermoplastic elastomer was used instead of real fingerprint. We confirmed that conversion loss of piezoelectric film/substrate structure was increased by contacting the elastomer due the change of reflection coefficient of the substrate bottom/elastomer interface. Minimum conversion loss images were obtained by mechanically scanning the soft probe on the transducer surface. We achieved the detection of the fingerprint phantom based on the elastomer in the GHz.

Emerging next generation wireless communication devices call for high-performance filters that operate at 3-10 GHz frequency range and offer low loss, small form factor, wide bandwidth and steep skirts. Bulk and surface acoustic wave devices have been long used in the RF front-end for filtering applications, however their operation frequencies are mostly below 2.6 GHz band. To scale up the frequency of the filters, the thickness of the piezoelectric material needs to be reduced to sub-micron ranges. One of the challenges of such scaling is maintaining high electromechanical coupling as the film thickness decreases, which in turn, determines the filter bandwidth.Aluminum Nitride (AlN) - popular in today's film bulk acoustic resonators (FBARs) and mostly deposited using sputtering techniques-shows degraded crystal quality and poor electromechanical coupling when the thickness of AlN film is smaller than 1 μm.In this work, we propose using high-quality single-crystalline AlN and Scandium (Sc)-doped AlN epi-layers grown on Si substrates, wherein high crystal quality is maintained for ultra-thin films of only 400 nm thickness. Experimental results verify improved kt2 for 3-10 GHz resonators, with quality factors of the order of 250 and kt2 values of up to 5%based on bulk acoustic wave resonators. The experimental results suggest that single-crystal Sc-AlN is a great material candidate for 5G resonators and filters.