A comparative study on the design and simulation of TFBAR and polyimide-TFBAR based RF bandpass filters

The present work focusses on the design and simulation of a thin film bulk acoustic resonator (TFBAR) and a polyimide based TFBAR (PI-TFBAR) and compares the radio frequency (RF) bandpass filter response designed from these resonators. The Polyimide layer in the PI-TFBAR acts as an acoustic wave reflector along with providing mechanical strength to the device. The designed third order bandpass filter has a ladder topology. The insertion loss of the TFBAR filter is 1.69 dB and the return loss is 39.60 dB whereas the insertion loss and return loss are 1.71 and 23.7 dB respectively for the PI-TFBAR filter. The bandwidth of the TFBAR filter is 68.0 MHz and for PI-TFBAR it is 25 MHz. The proposed filter designs, with further optimization, may have application in the 2.6 GHz band, which has been identified by the International Telecommunication Union as a global band for International Mobile Telecommunications and is one of the core bands of LTE-Advanced technology.