This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will investigate the feasibility of miniaturized, wide-bandwidth, low-loss bandpass filters for wireless communication and other signal processing applications enabled by novel high Q thin-film piezoelectric micromechanical resonators. The research team is proposing thin-film PZT-on-SOI micromechanical resonator topologies that can simultaneously enable filters with greater fractional bandwidth (up to 40%) and order-of-magnitude lower passband losses (less than 1 dB) than any competing technology by virtue of fundamentally superior electromechanical coupling and innovative resonator designs. Using contour and thickness extensional mode electromechanical resonators, the company can manufacture miniaturized banks of high-performance IF filters and discrete RF filters with frequencies ranging from 10 to 500 MHz and 500 MHz to 1 GHz, respectively. The resonators will be designed to maximize the kt 2Q product, which is regarded as an important figure of merit for filter design compared to current-state-of-the-art VHF to UHF filtering technologies, the proposed MEMS-based solution will permit system architectures with smaller form factors, reduced component count, and lower system power consumption. Moreover, the unprecedented combination of wide bandwidth and low loss in the proposed devices has the potential to enable paradigm shifts in radio front end design.
The filtering solutions proposed by the research team provide a compelling value proposition by offering up to several orders of magnitude reduction in size and weight (40X at 70 MHz and even greater reductions at lower frequencies), enabling lower power consumption via reduced filter insertion loss, costing substantially less, and exhibiting equal or better performance than their SAW or BAW filter competitors. The 2006 worldwide addressable market for the proposed IF filters alone is over $600 million, and includes the communications, aerospace / military, consumer electronics, automotive, and industrial sectors. The outcome of the study on the proposed technology will facilitate the deployment of low cost, high-performance, miniaturized communication electronics.
