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Projecte llegit

Títol: Nonlinearities integration of electro-acoustic resonators: AWR-Python application

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: COLLADO GÓMEZ, CARLOS

Departament: TSC

Títol: Nonlinearities integration of electro-acoustic resonators: AWR-Python application

Data inici oferta: 29-01-2025     Data finalització oferta: 31-01-2025


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG AERO/SIS TEL
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a (UPC): MATEU MATEU, JORDI
 
Paraules clau:
Electro-acoustic filters, SAW, AWR, Python.
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Se propone desarrollar una herramienta de software para simular las no-linealidades de resonadores electro-acústicos utilizando el programa de computación circuital AWR.

La aplicación a desarrollar debe ser fácil de usar y ha de permitir:
' El análisis no-lineal de filtros de resonadores
' La creación y lectura de circuitos desde AWR
' El ajuste dinámico de los parámetros de simulación
' La comparación con otras simulaciones y medidas reales
' La personalización de las características de los resonadores
El grupo CSC facilitará al alumno muestras de resonadores electro-acústicos reales para completar este proyecto.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Electro-acoustic (EA) filters are widely employed in the mobile communications industry and the aerospace sector especially in on-board satellite hardware.

EA filters are composed of several EA resonators, whose operating principle consist of two electrodes that generate an electric field through a piezoelectric material causing a deformation. This mechanical deformation (mechanical wave) can resonate into the device with a wavelength 105 times lower than its electromagnetic equivalent at the same frequency. It allows manufacture extremely small filters with exceptionally good performances.

Among the suitable EA technologies, Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) filters provide highly effective performance, and their small size is a significant aspect in the aerospace industry according to its always present objective of light weighting, which is of especial relevance in on-board satellite equipment.

The project aims to help characterizing this type of resonators. More specifically, characterizing the nonlinear behavior at the second and third harmonic frequencies, with the development of a Python coded application taking advantage of the AWR® software. It is important to evaluate and characterize the nonlinear effects of these resonators, as they can introduce undesired distortion in the signals, which would lead to a degradation of the quality of data transmission and communications. The aerospace industry demands its components to rigorously meet specific performance criteria. Thus, the evaluation of the nonlinear behavior of these devices would guarantee the stated criteria.

The nonlinear characterization is done using a nonlinear lumped model of SAW resonators previously developed by the CSC research group of the UPC. From the drop voltage and impedance of each resonator, the nonlinear sources of targeted harmonics are computed and transformed to equivalent current sources that can be easily applied into the electrical connections (electrodes) of the EA resonators. The use of the AWR-Python application would allow the user to re-evaluate filter synthesis to obtain better nonlinear behavior regarding the harmonics studied while maintaining the fundamental behavior, simulate real measurements without it being time consuming, and check the contribution of each resonator conforming the filter. All via an intuitive and user-friendly interface.

For the development of this project, Qorvo Inc., a leading company in the semiconductors and electro-acoustic filter sector that is currently collaborating with the CSC group, has provided a set of on-wafer electro-acoustic structures of SAW technology to be nonlinearly analyzed.

The application can use the filter designs from FILTRAW®, a software tool for synthesizing electroacoustic filters product of a previous collaboration of the group with the European Space Agency (ESA).

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