Lattice XBAR Filters in Thin-Film Lithium Niobate

Abstract

This work presents the demonstration of lattice filters based on laterally excited bulk acoustic resonators (XBARs). Two filter implementations, namely direct lattice and layout-balanced lattice topologies, are designed and fabricated in periodically poled piezoelectric film (P3F) thin-film lithium niobate (TFLN). By leveraging the strong electromechanical coupling of XBARs in P3F TFLN together with the inherently wideband nature of the lattice topology, 3-dB fractional bandwidths (FBWs) of 27.42\% and 39.11\% and low insertion losses (ILs) of 0.88 dB and 0.96 dB are achieved at approximately 20 GHz for the direct and layout-balanced lattice filters, respectively, under conjugate matching. Notably, all prototypes feature compact footprints smaller than 1.3 mm\textsuperscript{2}. These results highlight the potential of XBAR-based lattice architectures to enable low-loss, wideband acoustic filters for compact, high-performance RF front ends in next-generation wireless communication and sensing systems, while also identifying key challenges and directions for further optimization.