LAYERS 5 - Plasma assisted SiO2 FOR TC-SAW DEVICES

Evatec’s Process Engineer Hokwon Kim, Scientist Edmund Schuengel and Product Marketing Manager Carlo Tosi explain the importance of temperature compensation for TC-SAW devices and how plasma enhanced reactive magnetron sputter deposition on CLUSTERLINE® provides a cost effective manufacturing solution.

Temperature compensation layers are key

Fast and efficient communication for the new 5G world has driven the rapid advancement of radio-frequency (RF) filters technology for numerous communication devices. One of the most successful types of commercial RF filter devices are surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters. These utilize an interdigitated transducer (IDT) electrode configuration on piezoelectric substrates to couple the surface acoustic waves with the electric signal around a resonant frequency typically in the range from 10 MHz to 3 GHz. A high quality temperature-compensating layer, usually SiO2, that encapsulates the IDT structure of the TC-SAW device is essential to ensure high performance. Figure 1 illustrates the typical structures required.

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