Fundamental Antisymmetric Mode Acoustic Resonator in Periodically Poled Piezoelectric Film Lithium Niobate

Radio frequency (RF) acoustic resonators have long been used for signal processing and sensing. Devices that integrate acoustic resonators benefit from their slow phase velocity (vp), in the order of 3 to 10 km/s, which allows miniaturization of the device. Regarding the subject of small form factor, acoustic resonators that operate at the so-called fundamental antisymmetric mode (A0), feature even slower vp (1 to 3 km/s), which allows for smaller devices. This work reports the design and fabrication of A0 mode resonators leveraging the advantages of periodically poled piezoelectricity (P3F) lithium niobate, which includes a pair of piezoelectric layers with opposite polarizations to mitigate the charge cancellation arising from opposite stress of A0 in the top and bottom piezoelectric layers. The fabricated device shows a quality factor (Q) of 800 and an electromechanical coupling (k2) of 3.29, resulting in a high figure of merit (FoM, Q times k2) of 26.3 at the resonant frequency of 294 MHz, demonstrating the first efficient A0 device in P3F platforms. The proposed A0 platform could enable miniature signal processing, sensing, and ultrasound transducer applications upon optimization.

A 5.3 GHz Al0.76Sc0.24N Two-Dimensional Resonant Rods Resonator with a kt2 of 23.9%

This work reports on the measured performance of an Aluminum Scandium Nitride (AlScN) Two-Dimensional Resonant Rods resonator (2DRR), fabricated by using a Sc-doping concentration of 24%, characterized by a low off-resonance impedance (~25 Ohm) and exhibiting a record electromechanical coupling coefficient (kt2) of 23.9% for AlScN resonators. In order to achieve such performance, we identified and relied on optimized deposition and etching processes for highly-doped AlScN films, aiming at achieving high crystalline quality, low density of abnormally oriented grains in the 2DRR's active region and sharp lateral sidewalls. Also, the 2DRR's unit-cell has been acoustically engineered to maximize the piezo-generated mechanical energy within each rod and to ensure a low transduction of spurious modes around resonance. Due to its unprecedented kt2, the reported 2DRR opens exciting scenarios towards the development of next generation monolithic integrated radio-frequency (RF) filtering components. In fact, we show that 5th-order 2DRR-based ladder filters with fractional bandwidths (BW) of ~11%, insertion-loss (I.L) values of ~2.5 dB and with >30 dB out-of-band rejections can now be envisioned, paving an unprecedented path towards the development of ultra-wide band (UWB) filters for next-generation Super-High-Frequency (SHF) radio front-ends.

Top-Rank-Focused Adaptive Vote Collection for the Evaluation of Domain-Specific Semantic Models

The growth of domain-specific applications of semantic models, boosted by the recent achievements of unsupervised embedding learning algorithms, demands domain-specific evaluation datasets. In many cases, content-based recommenders being a prime example, these models are required to rank words or texts according to their semantic relatedness to a given concept, with particular focus on top ranks. In this work, we give a threefold contribution to address these requirements: (i) we define a protocol for the construction, based on adaptive pairwise comparisons, of a relatedness-based evaluation dataset tailored on the available resources and optimized to be particularly accurate in top-rank evaluation; (ii) we define appropriate metrics, extensions of well-known ranking correlation coefficients, to evaluate a semantic model via the aforementioned dataset by taking into account the greater significance of top ranks. Finally, (iii) we define a stochastic transitivity model to simulate semantic-driven pairwise comparisons, which confirms the effectiveness of the proposed dataset construction protocol.