CMOS-compatible electrochemical process for RF CMOS inductors

This paper demonstrates a CMOS-compatible electrochemical etching process to reduce effectively the substrate loss which parasitizes RF CMOS inductors while maintains the mechanical support of silicon substrate. The advantages of this post-process are CMOS-compatible and mask-less that decreases substantially the difficulty and the cost of fabrication. The result presents that the quality factor of RF CMOS inductor is enhanced 100 % at 9.8 GHz through this post-process. In addition, this technique could advance the development of SoC (system on a chip) and the applications of RF CMOS circuit.