Acoustic Ridge Waveguide Technology

This report presents results obtained during the second six months of development of acoustic waveguides. A primary motivation for developing acoustic waveguides is to take advantage of the potential size reduction over current surface acoustic wave technology. Waveguide components represent the next step in microminiaturization of acoustic signal processing devices. Devices that may be developed include directional couplers, ring resonators, and serial memory. In addition, because of the high degree of spatial confinement of the acoustic energy, nonlinear and acousto-optic interactions become possible. The technical problems associated with this research are threefold 1 development of suitable etching processes for waveguide formation, 2 development of fine geometry stencils for transducer fabrication, and 3 development of transducer weighting characteristics for bandpass shaping. Author