HALE4SPACE

The main goal of the project is the development of a family of Band-Pass Filters (BPF) based on Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) resonators with the series and parallel resonant frequencies controlled by printed L-C lumped elements. Thus, the BPF will be a hybrid combination of high Q-factor piezoelectric resonators with lower Q-factor reactive components. The filters will be designed and fabricated on a layer of gallium nitride (GaN) grown by Metal-Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD) on a high resistivity silicon wafer. The layer thickness will be about 1 µm. The target applications are satellite communications in the frequency range 3 – 9 GHz. The C-Band (uplink 5.925-6.425 GHz; downlink 3.7-4.2 GHz) is primarily used for voice and data communications as well as backhauling. The X-Band (uplink 7.9 – 8.4 GHz, downlink 7.25 – 7.75 GHz) is used mainly for military communications and Wideband Global SATCOM (WGS) systems. The concept of tuning the SAW resonator frequency response using printed lumped elements in GaN-on-Silicon technology in the 3 – 10 GHz frequency range is new. The proposed BPF performances (in-band insertion losses between 5 – 12 dB and out-of-band rejection higher than 40 dB) are well beyond the current state of the art. In the present project we propose to design and fabricate the band-pass filter structures, and test them on-wafer in laboratory environment, thus taking the technology from TRL2 (“Technology concept and/or application formulated”) to TRL4 (“Component and/or Breadboard Functional Validation in Laboratory Environment”).