VHF and UHF mechanically coupled aluminum nitride MEMS filters

Abstract

This paper reports the development of narrow-bandwidth, post-CMOS compatible aluminum nitride (AlN) MEMS filters operating in the very (VHF) and ultra (UHF) high frequency bands. Percent bandwidths less than 0.1% are achieved utilizing a mechanically coupled filter architecture, where a quarter wavelength beam attached in low velocity coupling locations is used to connect two AlN ring resonators. The filter bandwidth has been successfully varied from 0.09% to 0.2% by moving the attachment of the coupling beam on the ring to locations with different velocity at resonance. Insertion losses of 11 dB are obtained for filters centered at 99.5 MHz with low termination impedances of 200 Omega. Utilizing a passive temperature compensation technique, the temperature coefficient of frequency (TCF) for these filters has been reduced from -21 ppm/C to 2.5 ppm/C. The reduced TCF is critical for narrow bandwidth filters, requiring only 13% of the filter bandwidth to account for military range (-55 to 125 C) temperature variations compared to 100% for uncompensated filters. Filters operating at 557 MHz are realized using overtone operation of the ring resonators and coupling beam where higher insertion losses of 32 dB into 50 Omega are seen due to the finite resonator quality factor and narrow bandwidth design. Overtone operation allows for the implementation of fully differential and balun type filters where the stop-band rejection is as high as 38 dB despite the increased insertion loss.