In the study of acoustic characteristics of micro-scale surface phononic crystal, the band gap characteristics below 100 MHz need to be further optimized. In this work, a piezoelectric surface phononic crystal with a composite column composed of nickel balls and epoxy backing is proposed. The finite element method is used to calculate the band gap characteristics and displacement vector field of the model. The influence of column radius on the band structure is studied, and meanwhile, the effect of the multi-layer composite column structure on the band gap is discussed via increasing the number of elements in the composite column, while the reason for the opening of the high-order band gap is analyzed in detail by combining the vibration mode. Furthermore, the temperature adjustability of the band gap is further studied. The results show that the spherical composite column deposition structure can open a wider complete band gap of surface acoustic wave in a lower frequency range than the existing inverse conical surface phononic crystal structure with the same lattice constant (Hsu J C, Lin F S 2018 Jpn. J. Appl. Phys. 5707LB01 ). The restricted cavity mode is easily formed between the hard boundaries with the increase of column radius, which provides a possible way for low-order vibration modes to open high-order band gaps. There exist mode inheritance and energy coupling between adjacent modes, which leads the band gap to flatten and anti-flatten. Moreover, the real-time adjustment of band gap frequency by external temperature field can be realized via introducing the temperature-sensitive material epoxy resin into the structure. The band gap frequency range can be effectively reduced by increasing the number of composite cylinder layers, while the multi-vibrator structure can generate multipole resonance coupling with traveling wave and finally open a complete band gap between high-order frequency bands. This work provides a theoretical reference for analyzing the low-frequency band gap mechanism of micron-scale surface phononic crystal.