SOI technologies from digital to RF and beyond

Silicon-on-Insulator (SOI) technology has taken the radio-frequency (RF) world by storm in the past decade. By offering high performance at low cost it has steadily displaced Gallium-Arsenide and Silicon-on-Sapphire technologies to become the mainstream technology for RF switch banks in mobile applications. In 2008, RF-SOI accounted for less than 10% of switching modules in handsets, and today (2019) virtually 100% of all modern-day smartphones include RF switches implemented in partially depleted (PD) SOI on engineered and optimized trap-rich (TR) silicon-based substrates [1]. The success of PD-SOI (130 nm) in today’s RF market is not only due to significant technological improvements at the transistor level, but necessary optimizations have also been made at the substrate and back-end of line levels to enable performance RF applications.