Songbin Gong paper honored with 2022 Microwave Prize

For a paper that introduced a new technology for radio-frequency filtering, Songbin Gong and his co-authors have been honored with the 2022 Microwave Prize from the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (MTT-S).

Each year, the Microwave Prize recognizes one paper, published by IEEE during the calendar year two years earlier, that has been judged that year’s most significant contribution to MTT-S’s field of interest. This year’s prize-winning paper is “Surface Acoustic Wave Devices Using Lithium Niobate on Silicon Carbide" by Shibin Zhang, Ruochen Lu, Hongyan Zhou, Steffen Link, Yansong Yang, Zhongxu Li, Kai Huang, Xin Ou, and Songbin Gong. It was published in the IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques in September 2020.

Radio-frequency filtering is an important component of wireless communication front-end systems, and its improvement will be key to emerging 5G and Internet of Things applications. The winning paper introduced a new type of device technology for radio-frequency filtering, in which lithium niobate thin films are applied to silicon carbide substrates.

Gong, who is an associate professor and Intel Alumni Fellow in Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Holonyak Micro & Nanotechnology Lab, explains that the functionality provided by the new solution is already available, using different materials and device structures—but that the authors’ novel combination of materials, and their development of an optimal design for those materials, resulted in a significantly improved performance. “This particular combination... allows us to confine the acoustic waves very well onto the piezoelectric [i.e., the lithium niobate film]; as a result, we can engineer a device with very high performance, in comparison to the state of the art.”

In real-world terms, the innovation will translate into visibly improved performance for wireless device users. For example, “[our] device has a much higher ‘quality factor’ than the existing state of the art. So if you use that high quality factor to build a filter, you’re going to have lower loss, which means that your phone will last longer [on the same battery charge],” Gong says. Further, “the electromechanical coupling of the devices is also much higher than the state of the art around this frequency range; that means you can build wider-bandwidth filters, which allow you to have more physical bandwidth for communication. That would give you a higher data rate for downloading and uploading.”

The team has filed a patent application based on the findings described in the paper.

Gong says he’s particularly happy about the prestigious award because three of his young co-authors have just embarked on faculty careers. “Hopefully this award will give them... more recognition they deserve and launch their career, and allow them more visibility to get more opportunities.”

Co-author Zhang was previously a visiting scholar in Gong’s group and is now an assistant professor at the Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology (SIMIT). Lu is a former Ph.D. student and postdoc of Gong’s who is now an assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin. Zhou is a graduate student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Shanghai, and Link is a current graduate student of Gong’s. Yang is a former Ph.D. student and postdoc of Gong’s who is now an assistant professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The other three honorees are all at SIMIT: Li as a graduate student, Huang as an assistant researcher, and Ou as a professor.

Dating to 1955, the Microwave Prize is the oldest award offered by MTT-S, which was known as the IEEE Microwave Theory and Techniques Society until 2022. This year’s Prize will be conferred during the annual Society Awards Banquet, which will be held this June during the International Microwave Symposium in Denver.