On the Performance Evaluation of Commercial SAW Resonators by Means of a Direct and Reliable Equivalent-Circuit Extraction

Giovanni Gugliandolo; Zlatica Marinković; Giuseppe Campobello; Giovanni Crupi; Nicola Donato

doi:10.3390/mi12030303

On the Performance Evaluation of Commercial SAW Resonators by Means of a Direct and Reliable Equivalent-Circuit Extraction

Micromachines (Basel). 2021 Mar 14;12(3):303. doi: 10.3390/mi12030303.

Authors

Giovanni Gugliandolo¹, Zlatica Marinković², Giuseppe Campobello³, Giovanni Crupi⁴, Nicola Donato^{3

5}

Affiliations

¹ MIFT Department, University of Messina, 98166 Messina, Italy.
² Faculty of Electronic Engineering, University of Niš, 18000 Niš, Serbia.
³ Engineering Department, University of Messina, 98166 Messina, Italy.
⁴ BIOMORF Department, University of Messina, 98100 Messina, Italy.
⁵ INSTM Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per la Scienza e Tecnologia dei Materiali, 50121 Florence, Italy.

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.

Keywords: circuit modeling; metrological evaluation; resonators; scattering parameter measurements; surface acoustic waves.