Piezoelectric Lateral-Extensional Mode Resonators With Reconfigurable Electrode and Resonance Mode-Switching Behavior Enabled by a VO₂ Thin-Film

Abstract

This article presents the first two-port lateral-extensional mode zinc oxide (ZnO) piezoelectric resonator with a reconfigurable bottom electrode that is enabled by embedding a vanadium dioxide (VO₂) thin film. The insulator-to-metal phase transition of VO₂ is triggered by substrate heating that translates to abrupt changes in electric field patterns and piezoelectrically transduced modal vibrations, thus allowing mode-switching of piezoelectric resonators at specific frequencies. Finite element method (FEM) analysis was used to model the broadband frequency response, while frequency characteristics of the corresponding two-port resonator were measured over a temperature range between 20 °C and 95 °C with a specific focus on two resonances at 88 and 148 MHz. By leveraging the hysteretic behavior of VO₂ thin film during a heating/cooling cycle, a change in both the capacitive feedthrough and resonance signal levels was observed, due to the abrupt change in the conductivity of VO₂ during its phase transition. The unique switch- ON behavior of the resonance at 88 MHz starts at 70 °C during the heating cycle, while the switch- OFF transition begins at 60 °C during the cooling cycle. On the other hand, when the temperature is increased from 20 °C to 60 °C, a decrease in the insertion loss and resonance frequency of 12 dB and 0.28 MHz, respectively, were observed for the resonance at 148 MHz. Meanwhile, a resonance frequency increase of 0.42 MHz was observed during a temperature increase from 60 °C to 95 °C, which can be ascribed to VO₂ phase transition from monoclinic to rutile phase. The hysteresis loops for insertion loss and resonance frequency indicate a different critical temperature for phase transition from the monoclinic (insulator) phase and rutile (metallic) phase and vice versa. The substantial variation in the temperature coefficient of frequency can be largely ascribed to electrode reconfiguration enabled by VO₂ phase transition.