Abstract
This paper investigates the design, fabrication, and characterization of a miniaturized shear horizontal surface acoustic (SH-SAW) resonator based on a lithium niobate-on-insulator (LNOI) platform targeting gigahertz passive voltage amplification for the first time. Since low static capacitance (C o ) and clean spectrum are the keys to high passive gain for a one-port resonator, a short-aperture interdigital transducer (IDT) is proposed in this study to achieve low static capacitance while eliminating most spurious modes. The proposed SH-SAW resonator with C o of only 160 fF operates at 1.026 GHz while achieving a large electromechanical coupling coefficient (Keff2) of 22.8% and a maximum quality factor (Q max ) of 910, resulting in an excellent figure of merit (FoM) of 207. High passive voltage gains of 25.8 dB and 22.7 dB are also extracted with reasonable capacitive loads (C L ) of 80 fF and 250 fF, respectively. The achieved specifications demonstrate the potential of LNOI SH-SAW technology in gigahertz high-gain impedance transformers.