Demonstration and Modelling of Excellent RF Switch Performance of 22nm FD-SOI Technology for Millimeter-Wave Applications

A unique NFET device with specially treated region underneath the buried-oxide (BOX) in the state-of-the-art 22 nm FD-SOI technology (GLOBALFOUNDRIES’ 22FDX
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technology), displays excellent switch performance for wide frequency range. Very gradual frequency response of the switch insertion-loss (IL) makes the device ideal choice for 80 GHz applications with sub-2 dB IL. Other RF figure of merits (FoMs) like cut-off frequency fT (351 GHz) and maximum oscillation frequency fMAX (317 GHz) along with the DC FoMs indicate that the device can be utilized for the power-amplifier (PA) and low-noise amplifier (LNA) applications also. For mmWave switch circuit designs, accurate modelling is important to predict the switch behaviour for wide frequency range. This paper proposes the modelling methodology to predict the unconventional frequency response of switch IL accurately up to 80 GHz.