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This paper studies the impact of silicon-substrate bulk and interface resistivity properties on the performance of mm-wave devices and circuit modules implemented in 22 nm FD-SOI. To achieve this, key devices were fabricated in Global- Foundries’s 22FDX® node and studied on several types of substrates, from the conventional 10 Ωcm silicon wafers with over 500 Ωcm high-resistivity ones. Furthermore, several silicon-interface conditions were explored, offering process variations in the substrate’s interface resistivity on top of the change in substrate bulk resistivity. First, substrate influence on passive structures are investigated using CPW lines and spiral inductors, and significant improvements in lineic loss and quality factor are demonstrated when using improved high-resistivity (>500 Ωcm) substrate materials and passivated interfaces over the conventional reference process using standard resistivity silicon (10 Ωcm). Next, several key front-end circuits were designed, fabricated and measured to demonstrate the substrate impact on higher complexity mm-wave modules, including switches, low-noise amplifiers (LNA) and power amplifiers (PA). The insertion-loss of the designed DC-40 GHz switch is measured to improve by 0.35 dB when employing the high-resistivity substrate options. The LNA demonstrator circuit operates from 42 to 67 GHz with a gain and noise figure of 19.90 and 3.76 dB at 55 GHz, which are shown to improve by +0.95 dB and –0.25 dB respectively when moving to the low-loss substrate option. Finally, the PA demonstrator circuit, which operates from 24 to 43 GHz with a peak power added efficiency of 25.1% and output power of 17.8 dBm on the reference standard substrate has those metrics improved to 26.6% and 18.1 dBm on the high-resistivity wafer. This work gives an overview of the increase in performance levels of the main key mm-wave passive and circuit blocks, and demonstrates that the substrate impacts the main figures of merits of these devices by 0.3 to 1.0 dB in the 20–60 GHz range of the devices considered in this study.
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Rack, M., Nyssens, L., Nabet, M., Lederer, D., & Raskin, J.-P. (2023). Impact of a High-resistivity Substrate on RF and mm-wave Performance of 22 nm FD-SOI Devices and Circuits. In Björn Debaillie, François Brunier, Dominique Morche, Erkan Nevzat Isa, Jan Craninckx (ed.), Technologies Enabling Future Mobile Connectivity & Sensing (1st ed.). Rive Publishers. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781032633039