CoventorWare 10 includes a new

FastPZE module that is 30 times

faster than competing techniques for
predicting the detailed frequency
response of bulk acoustic wave
resonators. Here, the advantages of
the new module are demonstrated
by application to a 3D Lithium
Niobate Lateral Vibrating Resonator
(LVR)

White Paper:
Fast Analysis
of Acoustic Resonators
for the Rapidly Growing
Premium RF Filter Market

Mattan Kamon, PhD

Distinguished Technologist
Coventor, Inc.

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Introduction
Acoustic resonator filters have been used in cell phones since the early
2G wireless standard. Now, typical smart phones employ thirty (30) or more
filters as mobile carriers push to support more and more data bands as well as
Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS. Market pressure for these RF filters to be compact
and inexpensive, yet meet the higher performance requirements of the 4G
standards, has spurred great interest in novel filter design concepts that further
miniaturize the transmit/receive chain of RF frontends The first successful filters
were surface acoustic wave (SAW) filters, but in the past few years the number
of bulk acoustic wave (BAW or FBAR) filters within a handset has grown rapidly
to fill the market demand above 1 GHz where SAW device performance
degrades (see [Aigner] for technical details, and [Hettenbach] for market
analysis). Most recently, bulk mode resonators that vibrate in plane to allow
multi-frequency filters on one substrate have garnered significant interest within
the research community. These in-plane bulk-mode resonators come by various
names such as contour-mode resonators (CMR) and laterally-vibrating
resonators (LVR).
Until now, simulation tools were not able to provide an accurate, detailed
frequency response for these filters in a practical amount of time. This limited a
designers ability to explore many design concepts or mitigate the effect of nonidealities in the design, such as spurs in the frequency response. The designer
typically simplified the simulations in order to get results in a reasonable amount
of time. The simplifications involved reducing the simulation geometry to a 2D
cross section (even though most devices exhibit 3D effects) and/or reducing the
number of frequency points simulated. Both of these simplifications risk missing
important features of the response, as is shown in this white paper.
Coventor has overcome the limitations of the conventional simulation
approach with the recent release of the FastPZE module in CoventorWare 10. In
this paper, we show that the new FastPZE module is 30 times faster than
competing techniques for computing the detailed frequency response of a
3D Lithium Niobate LVR described in [Gong13]. The FastPZE simulations
provide the admittance response over a broad frequency range in minutes rather
than many hours. For instance, Figure 1 shows the frequency response for the
LVR computed using a conventional approach with a limited number of frequency
points to make the simulation finish in a practical amount of time. Crucial
features of the frequency response, such as the frequency of the peak response
and presence of spurs are not captured precisely. In contrast, the result from
FastPZE accurately resolves these features to give true guidance to the
designer.

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Figure 1: Frequency response of 3D LVR described in this paper. A conventional

frequency sweep (red circles) does not resolve spurs or the main resonance compared to
the FastPZE simulation (black line). Both simulations took the same amount of simulation
time.

Many simulation tools provide only the frequency response to a single set
of voltage stimuli. Unfortunately, this frequency response does not provide
metrics to guide design nor does it enable simulation with RF circuit simulators.
In contrast, the FastPZE module can automatically extract Butterworth VanDyke (BVD) component parameters from the frequency response to give the
motional RLC parameters and electromechanical coupling coefficient, 2 as
shown in Figure 2. Also, for multiport resonator systems, the ports can be
defined and the n-port admittance parameters automatically computed. This
admittance, which includes all the non-idealities of a true design, can be
converted to n-port s-parameters and written to Touchstone format for
simulation in RF circuit simulators.
In this paper, we will provide more details related to the modeling of the
Lithium Niobate LVR. Note that other features important to resonator design
such as thermal coefficient of frequency (TCF), thermo-elastic damping
(TED), and anchor loss also can be simulated with the CoventorWare tool suite,
but are not covered in this paper.

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Figure 2: FastPZE simulations results for LVR (blue) and automatically extracted BVD
response (red). The BVD parameters and electromechanical coupling are inset on the
bottom left.

As a final note before diving into the details, bear in mind that designs are
not necessarily constructed with Manhattan geometries (all edges at right angles
to each other). A design may consist of, for instance, arbitrary polygons or
curves. In some simulation tools, this would require a mesh made of
tetrahedrons. Unfortunately, since these are thin-film devices, this can lead to an
extremely large number of mesh elements and consequently very long simulation
times. CoventorWare, in contrast, provides very efficient meshing for thin-film
devices of non-Manhattan shape with straight or curved edges as shown in
Figure 3.

Figure 3: Efficient mesh (low number of elements) on a non-Manhattan shape (pentagon).

The CoventorWare meshing algorithms avoid using tetrahedrons to produce a very
efficient mesh. Edges can be at arbitrary angles and can be straight or curved. The Zdimension in the figure is exaggerated by 10X.

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Applying FastPZE to a LVR

We will demonstrate the FastPZE module on the laterally-vibrating Lithium
Niobate (LN) resonator [Gong13] shown in Figure 4. The resonator design
consists of 8 to 16 interdigitated electrodes on top of a suspended LN thin film.
The electrodes excite lateral expansion and compression under adjacent fingers
(an S0 Lamb wave) as shown in Figure 5, and the electrodes at the lateral ends
of the resonator are weighted to enhance the coupling into the desired mode
rather than spurious or overtone resonances.

Figure 4: SEM image of Laterally-vibrating resonator from [Gong13]. Printed with

permission from Prof. Gong, U. of Illinois.

Figure 5: Excited 3D mode shape. Cross-sectional view (top), top view (bottom).

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3D Model Creation and Meshing in CoventorWare

Given a mask layout (created in either CoventorWares Layout Editor or a
3rd-party layout editor) and a description of the fabrication steps, CoventorWares
3D solid modeling engine was used to build a 3D model, as pictured in Figure 6.

G
Figure 6: Given a mask layout and process description, CoventorWare automatically
generates a 3D solid model of the LVR.

The 3D model was meshed as shown in Figure 7. Enough elements were

used in the X direction to capture the S0 Lamb wave mode and enough in the Y
and Z directions to not significantly affect the frequency response. The accuracy
of this mesh is verified in the full CoventorWare tutorial [CWPZE].
Acoustic filters translate the electrical signal to an acoustic one through
the use of piezoelectric transduction. Lithium Niobate is a piezoelectric material
with a trigonal crystal structure. The material properties from [Kovacs] were used
as shown in Figure 8. Since the material properties are for the Z-cut of the
crystal but the designs from [Gong13] are all various orientations of the X-cut, the
model was rotated appropriately before simulation. For the simulations in the
next section, the X-cut 30 degrees to Y+ was used.

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Figure 7: Mesh on 3D model with 3114 parabolic hex elements (a), 12 elements per finger
pitch (b) to accurately capture the S0 Lamb wave mode.

Figure 8: Material properties of un-rotated (Z-cut) Lithium Niobate from [Kovacs].

Simulation Results and BVD Parameter Extraction

The four anchor faces were mechanically fixed and the two electrodes
defined as port #1 and ground. The FastPZE module performed a frequency
sweep from 0.4 GHz to 0.6 GHz. The frequency points are automatically chosen
to cluster points in the vicinity of each resonance and spur for accurate resolution
of these features. The admittance is shown in Figure 9 and shows spurs in the
frequency response that are only present when simulations are performed in 3D.

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Figure 9: Admittance computed from FastPZE. Green circles mark 4 spurs in the
frequency response that are in the measured data but only one is in the 2D analysis (see
Figure 10c of [Gong] for measured data and 2D analysis).

This design corresponds most closely to Design 4 in Figure 10c of

[Gong13]. Note that this design and Design 4 are not identical and also the
feed-through capacitance in the measured data was not included here.
Nonetheless, similar 3D spurs appear in the frequency response.
The compute times for this simulation and the same simulation on a finer
mesh are given in Table 1. FastPZE is roughly 30 times faster than the
conventional frequency sweep for this example.
Table 1: Simulation time for frequency response of LVR

Volume
mesh
nodes

Degrees
of
Freedom

Frequency
points

~18k

67k

~90k

350k

Simulation time (wall clock)

Conventional
frequency sweep
(estimated)

CoventorWare
FastPZE module

1680

~7hrs

15 min

1900

~74hrs

2hrs 20min

Figure 10 shows the circuit schematic for a Butterworth-Van Dkye (BVD)

model of a resonator. The FastPZE module can automatically extract BVD
parameters from the simulation data as previously shown in Figure 2. In addition,
the series and parallel resonances and electromechanical coupling can be
extracted and reported.

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Figure 10: Butterworth-Van Dyke circuit model of a resonator.

Multi-Port Analysis and S Parameter Extraction

The design in the previous section is a 1-port resonator. The parameters
of n-port resonators can also be automatically computed by defining more than
one port in the model specification. Below is a 2-port model similar to the design
in [Gong14].

Figure 11: Two-port model definition.

The admittance can be plotted as before, or alternately, given a

characteristic impedance, 0 , for each port, S-parameters can be plotted as
shown in Figure 12a. The Touchstone file exported for subsequent RF circuit
simulation is shown in Figure 12b.

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(a)

(b)

Figure 12: 2-port S-parameters (a) and the corresponding Touchstone file (b)

Parametric Analysis
As an example of parametric analysis, we sweep the angle of the X-cut as
illustrated in Figure 13 to optimize the electromechanical coupling as is done in
[Gong13]. The sweep can be automated and the frequency responses plotted
together as shown in Figure 14

Figure 13: Three configurations of the resonator relative to fixed crystallographic axes for
various angles to Y+.

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Figure 14: Admittance for 2 orientations.

The automatically extracted electromechanical coupling coefficients are

plotted in Figure 15 and show a maximum electro-mechanical coupling for an
orientation of 30 degrees to Y+. We note that this compares well to the results in
Figure 12 of [Gong13].

Figure 15: Electromechanical coupling coefficient as a function of crystal orientation

with respect to Y+.

Conclusions
In this paper we have shown that the FastPZE module of CoventorWare
10 provides three unique capabilities that aid resonator designers in meeting
time-to-market demands:

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Unprecedented speed for simulating the frequency response of 3D models

that precisely capture the main resonance and spurs;
Automatic extraction of design metrics such as BVD parameters,
electromechanical coupling, and series and parallel resonances; and
Automated multi-port analysis and S-parameter export to Touchstone
format.

Also mentioned but not demonstrated are the efficient meshing

capabilities for non-Manhattan designs containing arbitrary polygons or curved
edges. For thin-film acoustic structures, it is critical to avoid the extremely large
number of mesh elements required by tetrahedral meshes.
Finally, CoventorWare can also model other aspects of resonator design
such as thermal coefficient of frequency (TCF), thermo-elastic damping (TED),
and anchor loss. Those capabilities are documented elsewhere and are
available upon request.
The supporting files for this white paper are available as part of the
Piezoelectric Resonator Analysis tutorial included with CoventorWare 10.

References
[Aigner] R. Aigner, SAW, BAW and the future of wireless, EDN, May
2013, http://www.edn.com/design/wireless-networking/4413442/SAW--BAW-andthe-future-of-wireless
[Hettenbach] C. Hettenbach, Morgan Stanley Research. For summary,
see http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2013/11/25/avago-rf-filter-biz-tobenefit-from-cheap-smartphone-growth-says-morgan-stanley/
[Gong13] Songbin Gong and Gianluca Piazza, "Figure-of-Merit
Enhancement for Laterally Vibrating Lithium Niobate MEMS Resonators", IEEE
Transactions on Electron Devices, Vol. 60, No. 11, November 2013.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TED.2013.2281734

[Gong14] Songbin Gong and Gianluca Piazza, Monolithic MultiFrequency Wideband RF Filters Using Two-Port Laterally Vibrating Lithium
Niobate MEMS Resonators, IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems,
Vol. 23, No. 5, October 2014, p. 1188-1197.
[Kovacs] G. Kovacs, M. Anhorn, H. Engan, G. Visintini, and C. Ruppel,
Improved material constants for LiNbO3 and LiTaO3, in Proc. IEEE Ultrasonics
Symposium, Dec. 1990, Vol. 1, pp 435438.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ULTSYM.1990.171403
[CWPZE] Coventor, Inc. CoventorWare MEMS Design and Analysis
Tutorials and Piezoelectric Resonator Analysis, 2015.
http://www.coventor.com/mems-solutions/