RF CMOS and SOI Technology: Status quo, Recent Advances and Future Trends

With recent fast growth in the RF (Radio-Frequency) wireless communications market, the demand for high performance but low cost RF solutions is rising. Recent advances in SOI (Silicon on Insulator) and complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processing, continuous scaling of gate length, and progress in silicon on insulator have stirred serious discussions on the suitability of metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) for RF/microwave applications. The scale down of CMOS-SOI technologies has challenged toward the deep-submicron minimum feature size. This leads to great expectations for CMOS RF applications. This paper covers the recent advances and current status of mainstream CMOS and SOI as the dominating technologies in very large scale integration, future trends of RF MOSFETs, and applications of MOSFETs in RF electronics.