Atomera Incorporated, a semiconductor materials and technology licensing company, announced the availability of an MST® solution to dramatically enhance performance of RF-SOI wafer substrates for leading-edge cellular communication products. The company will demonstrate the effectiveness of this solution on experimental 300 mm RF-SOI wafers with an ultra-thin active layer utilizing a new formulation of Atomera’s MST® technology. For many years, it has been understood that thinner RF-SOI substrates would enable higher performance, but trade-offs between speed and power handling made implementation impractical until this solution was introduced by Atomera. These wafers, paired with MST should enable higher performance antenna switches, higher-fidelity low-noise amplifiers and other enhanced RF components for 5G Advanced and 6G applications. The company is working with multiple RF IC product manufacturers to evaluate and demonstrate the wide range of benefits of this MST-enabled technology solution.
“RF-SOI wafers originally developed by Soitec have become instrumental in the design and manufacture of high-quality cellular RF products,” said Pierre Cemeli, GM Connect SOI BU at Soitec. “We are pleased to supply our advanced experimental products for Atomera to combine with their own technology, with the ambition to progress the state of the art.”
RF-SOI substrates have become the standard platform for many RF devices, particularly front-end modules and are used in 100 percent of 5G smartphones today. RF-SOI substrates offer significantly better linearity and lower noise than conventional silicon substrates, and they are fully compatible with existing CMOS process flows. RF-SOI products and manufacturing processes are widely available from numerous IC suppliers and foundries.
“We have worked for several years to optimize RF-SOI application performance with MST,” said Scott Bibaud, CEO of Atomera. “Our current results are showing improvements in the critical RF switch characteristics of Ron∙Coff figure-of-merit, power handling capability and leakage. We look forward to leveraging the experimental ultra-thin RF-SOI substrates from Soitec to advance the capabilities of cellular RF and enable the next generation of mobile communications.”
Atomera will both contribute to the development of these advanced substrates, and will work with the entire RF ecosystem including IDMs and foundry manufacturers as well as fabless RF IC companies. Atomera will epitaxially deposit its RF-optimized MST film recipe on Soitec’s ultra-thin 300 mm RF-SOI substrates and ship them to development partners for fabrication. Atomera is working with select RF-SOI chip designers and foundries by providing its MSTcad® software so they can optimize their switches and other circuit devices to take full advantage of these substrates.
Advanced RF-SOI substrates are available for evaluation today by contacting Atomera.