RF electrical isolation with porous silicon

Abstract

The increasing expansion of telecommunication applications leads to the integration of complete system on chip associating various processing units mixing passive and active elements. Nevertheless, passive component performances are limited by the underlying lossy silicon wafer. Then, obviously, the use of innovative substrates becomes crucial for monolithic RF systems to reach high performances. So, looking for IC compatible processes, porous silicon seems to be a promising candidate as it can provide localized isolating regions from various silicon substrates. In this chapter, we propose a synthesis of RF device technologies that use porous silicon for reducing losses into the substrate. The state-of-the-art performances of widespread RF devices, that is to say, inductors or coplanar waveguides, are then presented. Other RF devices which use porous silicon as a substrate are also described.