Substrate agnostic monolithic integration of the inline phase-change switch technology

Abstract

Omni-directional GeTe inline phase-change switches (IPCS) have been fabricated and heterogeneously integrated with commercial SiGe BiCMOS technology to create a reconfigurable receiver. The reconfigurable receiver required integrating thirteen (13) 8-port and two (2) 4-port omni-directional switch circuits with a commercial SiGe IC, requiring very stable and repeatable performance from the 112 integrated GeTe IPCS devices. Insertion loss, isolation, and cycling data will be presented, as well as performance issues encountered during the heterogeneous integration process. A new monolithic integration scheme is briefly discussed that is independent of the substrate and semiconductor technology used. This integration plan enables the monolithic fabrication of GeTe IPCS devices on any semiconductor technology, allowing low-loss, low-power, broadband reconfigurable RF systems and SoCs (system-on-chip) to be realized in any technology.