Radio frequency (RF) devices are becoming more multi-band, increasing the number of filters and other front-end components while simultaneously pushing towards reduced cost, size, weight, and power (CSWaP). One approach to reducing CSWaP is to augment the achievable functionalities of electromechanical/acoustic filtering chips to include "active" and nonlinear functionalities, such as gain and mixing. The acoustoelectric (AE) effect could enable such active acoustic wave devices. We have examined the AE effect with a leaky surface acoustic wave (LSAW) in a monolithic structure of epitaxial indium gallium arsenide (In GaAs) on lithium niobate (LiNb0 3 ). This lead to experimentally demonstrated state-of-the-art SAW amplifier performance in terms of gain per acoustic wavelength, reduced power consumption, and increased power efficiency. We quantitatively compare the amplifier performance to previous notable works and discuss the outlook of active acoustic wave components using this material platform. Ultimately, this could lead to smaller, higher-performance RF signal processors for communications applications.
Active surface acoustic wave components have the potential to transform RF front ends by consolidating functionalities that currently occur across multiple chip technologies, leading to reduced insertion loss from converting back and forth between acoustic and electronic domains in addition to improved size and power efficiency. This letter demonstrates a significant advance in these active devices with a compact, high-gain, and low-power leaky surface acoustic wave amplifier based on the acoustoelectric effect. Devices use an acoustically thin semi-insulating InGaAs surface film on a YX lithium niobate substrate to achieve exceptionally high acoustoelectric interaction strength via an epitaxial In0.53Ga0.47As(P)/InP quaternary layer structure and wafer-scale bonding. We demonstrate 1.9 dB of gain per acoustic wavelength and power consumption of 90 mW for 30 dB of electronic gain. Despite the strong intrinsic leaky propagation loss, 5 dB of terminal gain is obtained for a semiconductor that is only 338 μm long due to state-of-the-art heterogenous integration and an improved material platform.
This paper demonstrates a monolithic surface acoustic wave amplifier fabricated by state-of-the-art heterogenous integration of a IH-V InGaAs-based epitaxial material stack and LiNb03. Due to the superior properties of the materials employed, we observe electron gain and also non-reciprocal gain in excess of 30dB with reduced power consumption. Additionally, we present a framework for performance optimization as a function of material parameters for a targeted gain. This platform enables further advances in active and non-reciprocal piezoelectric acoustic devices.
Dispersion engineering enables phase matching for nonlinear down conversion from 775nm to the telecom c-band in lithium niobite microdisk resonators without periodic poling. High rates of spontaneous creation of entangled photon pairs is observed.
We demonstrate doubly resonant second harmonic generation from 1550 to 775 nm in microdisks fabricated from lithium niobate on insulator wafers. We use a novel phase matching technique to achieve a conversion efficiency of 0.167%/mW.