Abstract
Nowadays, surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonators are attracting growing attention, owing to their widespread applications in various engineering fields, such as electronic, telecommunication, automotive, chemical, and biomedical engineering. A thorough assessment of SAW performance is a key task for bridging the gap between commercial SAW devices and practical applications. To contribute to the accomplishment of this crucial task, the present paper reports the findings of a new comparative study that is based on the performance evaluation of different commercial SAW resonators by using scattering (S-) parameter measurements coupled with a Lorentzian fitting and an accurate modelling technique for the straightforward extraction of a lumped-element equivalent-circuit representation. The developed investigation thus provides ease and reliability when choosing the appropriate commercial device, depending on the requirements and constraints of the given sensing application. This paper deals with the performance evaluation of commercial surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonators by means of scattering (S-) parameter measurements and an equivalent-circuit model extracted using a reliable modeling procedure. The studied devices are four TO-39 packaged two-port resonators with different nominal operating frequencies: 418.05, 423.22, 433.92, and 915 MHz. The S-parameter characterization was performed locally around the resonant frequencies of the tested SAW resonators by using an 8753ES Agilent vector network analyzer (VNA) and a home-made calibration kit. The reported measurement-based study has allowed for the development of a comprehensive and detailed comparative analysis of the performance of the investigated SAW devices. The characterization and modelling procedures are fully automated with a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI) developed in the Python environment, thereby making the experimental analysis faster and more efficient.
Highlights
Surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are key electronic components, which were firstly described by Lord Rayleigh in 1885 [1]
surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are largely employed in telecommunications with more than three billion SAW components manufactured every year and used as band pass filters and resonators in radio receivers of mobile cell phones, base stations, and RF front ends [7,8,9,10,11,12,13]
We present a measurement-based performance evaluation of four commercial TO-39 packaged two-port SAW resonators working in a frequency range spanning from 418.05 to 915 MHz
Summary
Surface acoustic wave (SAW) devices are key electronic components, which were firstly described by Lord Rayleigh in 1885 [1]. SAW devices are largely employed in telecommunications with more than three billion SAW components manufactured every year and used as band pass filters and resonators in radio receivers of mobile cell phones, base stations, and RF front ends [7,8,9,10,11,12,13] They are employed in many other different areas, such as automotive [14] and bioengineering applications, where they are used, for instance, as microfluidic devices [15,16,17] by exploiting the fact that, by inducing an electric field and generating a mechanical wave, it is possible to pump and drive liquids. The significance of this study lies in the fact that, the achieved findings can strongly depend on the specific studied devices, the investigation methodology, based on the equivalent-circuit extraction from S-parameter measurements, is technology independent and straightforwardly applicable to different commercial SAW devices, allowing for a deeper analysis of the device behavior and appropriate selection of the device according to the requirements of the given sensing application
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