A micromachining technology for integrating low-loss GHz RF passives on non-high-resistivity low-cost silicon MCM substrate

Abstract: A micromachining technology for integrating high-performance radio-frequency (RF) passives on CMOS-grade low-cost silicon substrates is developed. The technology can form a thick solid-state dielectric isolation layer on silicon substrate through high-aspect-ratio trench etch and refill. On the non-high-resistivity but low-loss substrate, two metal layers with an inter-metal dielectric layer are formed for integrating embedded RF components and passive circuits. Using the technology, two types of integrated RF filters are fabricated that are band-pass filter and image-reject filter. The band-pass filter shows measured minimum insertion loss of 3.8dB and return loss better than 15dB, while the image-reject filter exhibits steeper band selection and achieves better than −30dB image rejection. A 50Ω co-planar waveguide (CPW) on the substrate is also demonstrated, showing low loss and low dispersion over the measured frequency range up to 40GHz. The developed technology proves a viable solution to implementing silicon-based multi-chip modules (MCM) substrates for RF system-in-package (RF-SiP). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]