Advances in RF foundry technology for wireless and wireline communications

Improvements in foundry RF and mm-wave Si offerings over the last several years have allowed it to take market share from III-V processes for TX / RX applications. The increased RF switch content in handsets is now dominated by RF-SOI which also supports LNA and PA integration. SiGe BiCMOS technolog...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in2016 IEEE 16th Topical Meeting on Silicon Monolithic Integrated Circuits in RF Systems (SiRF) pp. 5 - 8
Main Authors Hurwitz, P., Kanawati, R., Moen, K., Preisler, E., Chaudhry, S., Racanelli, M.
Format Conference Proceeding
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.01.2016
Subjects
BiCMOS integrated circuits
front end modules
millimeter wave
Phased arrays
power amplifiers
Radio frequency
RF switch
SiGe
Silicon germanium
SOI
Substrates
Switches
Transmission line measurements
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Summary:Improvements in foundry RF and mm-wave Si offerings over the last several years have allowed it to take market share from III-V processes for TX / RX applications. The increased RF switch content in handsets is now dominated by RF-SOI which also supports LNA and PA integration. SiGe BiCMOS technologies support the 802.11 FEIC and GPS receiver IC products and may be poised to take a larger share of the cellular PA market in the coming years. Higher-speed, high yielding SiGe BiCMOS is enabling new building blocks such as single-chip 60 GHz phased arrays. Here we review recent improvements in key technology figures of merit and integration that are driving the increased use of RF specialty silicon for high performance wireless and wireline communications.
DOI:10.1109/SIRF.2016.7445453