Dry followed by wet backside etching processes for micromachined endfire antennae

Abstract

This paper presents a novel technological process based on dry followed by wet backside silicon etching for the manufacturing of ‘quasi-three edge’ membranes-supported millimeter wave circuits. The process is based on a backside deep reactive ion etching used to remove the first 350 µm of silicon, followed by wet etching in KOH solution, to eliminate the remaining 50 µm of silicon and create quasi-free edge membranes, according to the undercut mechanism. In order to validate the technology, a Yagi–Uda antenna for 45 GHz was designed using the Zeland IE3D software package, and fabricated. The demonstrator was characterized in terms of return loss and isotropic gain using ‘on wafer’ measurements. The agreement between the modeling and the measurements is very good, and validates the new technological approach, which assures free-space propagation conditions for endfire membrane-supported antennae structures.