Miniature Surface Acoustic Wave Duplexer Using SiO₂/Al/LiNbO₃ Structure for Wide-Band Code-Division Multiple-Access System

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the development of a miniature surface acoustic wave (SAW) duplexer for Band I in the standard of the Third-Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) at a 2 GHz band. We employed a shear-horizontal SAW on a SiO2 overlay/thick Al electrode/5°YX-LiNbO3 structure, which offers a high electromechanical coupling coefficient (K2) as well as a small temperature coefficient of frequency (TCF). This feature is crucial for the realization of a wide duplex gap between the transmitting and receiving bands in the Band I specification. We investigated experimentally that the spurious response caused by the Rayleigh-mode could effectively be suppressed by controlling the cross-sectional shape of a SiO2 overlay on interdigital transducer (IDT) electrodes. In addition, the result also showed how this spurious response depends on IDT design parameters, i.e., electrode pitch and metallization ratio. The developed SAW duplexer was installed in a 2.5×2.0 mm2 package, and exhibited a low insertion loss, a high out-of-band rejection and a small TCF.