Design and fabrication of 2D phononic crystals in surface acoustic wave micro devices

In this paper, We present the design and fabrication of innovative phononic crystals integrated with two sets of interdigital (IDT) electrodes for frequency band selection of surface acoustic waves (SAW). The potential applications of this device include performance improvement of SAW micro-sensors, front-end components in RF circuitries, and directional receptions of high frequency acoustic waves. Analogous to the band-gap generated by photonic crystals, the phononic crystals, two dimensional repetitive structures composed of two different elastic materials, can prohibit the propagation of elastic waves with either specific incident angles or certain bandwidth. In this paper, the prohibited bandwidth has been verified by fabricating the phononic crystals between a micromachined SAW resonator and a receiver. Both the resonator and receiver are composed of IDT electrodes deposited and patterned on a thin piezoelectric layer. To confine the prohibited bandwidth on the order of hundred MHz, the diameter of the circular pores in phononic crystals is designed to be 6 micron and the aspect ratio of each pore is 3:1. To maximize the power transduction from IDT electrodes to SAW, the spacing between two inter-digits is one-fourth the wavelength of SAW. Specifically, the spacing ranges from 3.4 microns to 9.0 microns, depending on the central frequency. Both surface and bulk micromachining are employed and integrated to fabricate the crystals as well as SAW resonator and receiver altogether. Firstly, a 1.5-micron zinc oxide, which provides well-defined central frequency, is sputtered and patterned onto silicon substrate. Second, the IDT electrodes are evaporated and patterned by lift-off technique. Then the exposed silicon substrate is etched using DRIE to generate two dimensional phononic crystals. To tune the prohibited SAW bandwidth, the crystal pores are filled-with copper or nickel by electroless plating. The insertion loss of the fabricated devices is characterized and is found to agree with simulation results.