Establishment of production techniques for transducer acoustic delay lines on a pilot line basis

For about the past decade the development of microwave acoustic delay lines has seen few innovations. It is primarily for this reason that opportunities in the production of these lines leading to lower cost and improved performance was not realized. Such innovations include monolithic matching, mosaic transducers and an intensive investigation of processing steps and systems operation. All aspects of delay line design have been reexamined including media loss and anisotropy, transduction efficiency, diffraction and transducer film analysis. The net result of this effort is an essentially new approach to delay line design. This design lends itself well to batch fabrication processes with resulting cost reductions and performance improvement.