Foundry RF technologies

Landscape of semiconductor technologies and manufacturing has been changing in general and RF technologies in specific from IDMs to foundries and from exotic III-V compounds to the silicon. Tremendous advantage of RF performance from nanometer technologies, exponential increase in scalability, availability of high resistivity and engineered SOI substrates have opened doors for the convergence of all sorts of RF applications to silicon based RF technologies. Wafer foundries having been in the leading position of silicon based technologies are going to be benefited with this convergence and all design houses will have access to the same with minimal investments. This paper talks about the three major forces which are helping to converge all consumer RF application integrated circuits to total silicon based solutions with minimum form factor.