Fabrication of On-Silicon Aperture Coupled Patch Antenna Through Micromachining and Cu-Cu Thermocompression Bonding

Abstract

This paper, for the first time, reports the fabrication of an on-Silicon aperture-coupled 3D Patch antenna using micromachining and low-temperature, low-pressure Copper(Cu)-Copper(Cu) thermo-compression bonding. Micromachining technique was used to reduce the effective dielectric constant of Silicon (Si), thereby increasing the radiation efficiency. One of the main challenges in fabricating the aperture coupled patch antenna on Si is the realization of its 3D structure. The top and bottom substrates of the 3D antenna have to be bonded together without disturbing the micromachined thin membrane. This was achieved using thermo-compression bonding under optimized temperature and pressure conditions with a 3 nm Gold (Au) passivation layer, which prevents the oxidation of the Cu layer underneath and thereby reducing the inter-diffusion barrier across the interface. The proposed fabrication process flow introduces the novelty of using bonding/stacking metal inter-layer as the common ground of the antenna. The device was fabricated on high resistivity Si wafers to minimize the conduction losses. Herein, we have fabricated an aperture coupled 3D patch antenna with a cavity depth of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$200\pm ~10\mu \text{m}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , and the device characteristics were compared with the HFSS simulation results. The reliability of the fabricated antenna was assessed by bond strength analysis, cross sectional FESEM and TEM imaging. The on-chip antenna yielded a resonance frequency of 13.4 GHz, with VSWR 1.16. The radiation pattern of the antenna was also analyzed experimentally. This technology is the way forward to fabricating miniaturized high performance on-chip antennas.