Temperature compensation technology in Surface Acoustic Wave (TC-SAW) devices allows for improvement in their performance. OnScale enables designers to explore many TC-SAW device design spaces to offer a greater insight into the optimum design.
In this example, we simulate a 3D unit cell model of a TC-SAW device to analyse the effect of electrode and Si02 thickness on the electrical performance.
Model Setup
A schematic of the model and the two input variables can be seen below:
Basic Model Schematic
Parametric Variables
The key model parameters were as follows:
Parameter |
Description |
Default Value |
---|---|---|
subs_thk |
Thickness of substrate |
10 µm |
elec_thk |
Thickness of the electrodes |
100 nm |
si02_thk |
Thickness of Si02 layer |
250 nm |
fin_pitch |
SAW finger pitch |
1 µm |
nfing |
Number of finger pairs |
80 |
ncycles |
Simulation length in cycles |
2000 |
freqint |
Centre frequency |
1.9 GHz |
The design variable electrode thickness was swept from 100nm to 200nm in 14 steps and the Si02 thickness was swept from 250nm to 400nm in 14 steps. This resulted in a total of 196 simulations which were run in parallel.
Simulation Sweep Results
The full simulation sweep was completed in 2 minutes when using 8 cores per simulation and had a total cost of 52 core hours.
Using the outputs from the simulations, it is possible to calculate the device impedance, Q factor, resonance frequency and coupling coefficient. These outputs can all be plotted against the input variables to provide an insight into the device performance as shown in the image below: