Acoustic band gap-enabled high-Q micro-mechanical resonators

We report high-quality factor (e.g., more than 6,000) silicon resonators operating at high frequencies (~130 MHz) based on phononic crystals which are a new class of materials with artificially-engineerable phononic (or acoustic) properties. The resonators use the complete acoustic (or phononic) band gap of the designed crystal and are fabricated using a CMOS-compatible micromachining technology. As it will be discussed in this paper, these proof-of-concept phononic crystal resonators show the great potential of phononic crystal structures for efficiently confining and manipulating mechanical energy at the micrometer and nanometer length scales to surpass the performance of the conventional micromechanical devices used in wireless communication and sensing systems.