Porous silicon for electrical isolation in radio frequency devices: A review

Abstract

The increasing expansion of telecommunication applications leads to the integration of complete system-on-chip associating analog and digital processing units. Besides, the passive elements occupy an increasing silicon footprint, compromising circuit scalability and cost. Moreover, passive components’ performances are limited by the proximity of lossy Si substrate and surrounding metallization. Then, obviously, the characteristics of the substrate become crucial for monolithic radio frequency (RF) systems to reach high performances. So, looking for integrated circuit compatible processes, porous silicon (PS) seems to be a promising candidate as it can provide localized isolating regions from various silicon substrates. In this review, we first present all the possible porous silicon substrates, which can be used for RF devices. In particular, we put the emphasis on the etching conditions, leading to high thickness localized PS layers. The intrinsic electrical properties of porous silicon such as AC electrical conductivity or dielectric constant are also detailed, and the results extracted from the literature are commented. Then, we describe the performances of widespread RF devices, that is, inductors or coplanar waveguides. Finally, we describe methodologies used for predicting RF electrical responses of PS isolated devices, based on electromagnetic simulations.