(Invited) Current Status and Trends in RF Silicon-on-Insulator Material and Device

Radio Frequency (RF) Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) is today a mainstream technology for several front-end module integrated circuits. The high quality of the trap-rich SOI substrate in terms of low insertion loss and high linearity is at the origin of its commercial success. Partially depleted SOI transistors characterized with a channel length from 180 nm down to 45 nm are currently manufactured on top of the trap-rich substrate. However, there is a growing interest for moving from partially to fully depleted SOI transistors in order to improve the RF and millimeter-waves performance of the transistor at low power consumption. On-going research explores the possibility of combining the best of the digital FD SOI devices and high quality RF SOI substrate to design low power mixed-mode communication system-on-chip.