Nonlinear signal generation in a spurious free temperature compensated SAW resonator on a SiO ₂ /LiNbO ₃ structure

Abstract This paper describes nonlinear responses in spurious free temperature compensated (TC) surface acoustic wave (SAW) resonators where the piston design is applied to suppress both longitudinal and transverse resonances, and Cu/Pt is chosen as the electrode material for the SAW velocity reduction and suppression of hybrid mode responses. Owing to the spurious suppression, most of the spiky responses are eliminated from H3. This is also true for the second-order harmonics H2. The mBVD-based nonlinear analysis is applied to analyze the generation mechanism of H3. It is shown that H3 can be modeled well by the sum of contributions of dielectric and elastic nonlinearities except for a bump near the main resonance caused by the nonlinearity in probe contacts. It should be noted that H3 exhibited the anomalous power law known to occur in TC SAW devices. Even though H3 is proportional to the 1.5th power of the input signal power, its frequency dependence seems to obey the conventional cubic law.