SAW Device Simulation

Introduction

o Like many MEMs devices SAWs are fully electromechanically coupled devices,
which are often acoustically large. This can complicate simulation, leading to a
long and expensive design process

o PZFlex is specifically design for large ultrasonics problems, and its integrated
electromechanical solver makes it ideally suited for simulating SAW devices

o By simulating the device behaviour in the time domain PZFlex also offer an
excellent platform to compare simulation results directly to experimental
measurements
PZFlex Capabilities

o PZFlex includes the following features which are of particular relevance to

analysis of MEMs devices:
o Coupled electro-mechanical solver
o Full support for piezoelectric materials
o Time domain solver
o Broadband
o Fully elastic wave propagation
o Rapid solve time
o Low memory usage
o 2D and 3D models

Lateral displacement in SAW transmitter under

electrical excitation
Example Device Structure

o Example device structure:

o Excitation frequency: 100 MHz
o Device material: Aluminium Nitride
o Device thickness: 40 m
Positive and negative electrodes

12 Pairs of Transmit Electrodes 12 Pairs of Receive Electrodes

Device length 4.0 mm

Aluminium Nitride Dispersion Curves

o PZFlex can be used to analyse

Lamb wave dispersion in
substrate materials:

o Allows modal velocities to

be calculated

o Electrode spacing and

drive frequency can be
designed to excite a single
mode

o In this case a 51.8 m pitch

with will stimulate the A0
mode at 100 MHz
Aluminium Nitride Modal Velocity
Model Outputs

o As a time domain simulation PZFlex can provide results familiar to those more used to
dealing with experimental results, such as receive voltage (left) and its frequency
spectrum (right). Results show the A0 mode is dominant.
MPI Acceleration

o MPI allows models to be parallelised between multiple CPU cores, offering

considerable increases in performance
o SAW model runtime was reduced by a factor of 4.5 on a standard 8 core PC

Standard
Model MPI
Multithread

Elements 432,000 432,000

Runtime 23 mins 41 s 5 mins 19 s

Memory (RAM) 186 MB 186 MB

Conclusions

o PZFlex provides the capability to prototype SAW designs, recreating realistic

experimental setups and outputs

o The analysis provided can offer further insight into device operation, affording
designers a better understanding of the wave modes that their designs support, and
their resulting performance

o PZFlexs fast solver and the support for MPI allows models to be executed rapidly,
allowing many designs to be investigated in a short space of time