The Effect of Defect Charge and Parasitic Surface Conductance on Aluminum Nitride RF Filter Circuit Loss

Abstract

When AlN thin films are deposited directly on the high-resistance silicon (HR-Si) substrate, a conductive layer will be formed on the HR-Si surface. This phenomenon is called the parasitic surface conduction (PSC) effect. The presence of the PSC effect will increase the power consumption of electronic components. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the PSC effect. In prior technology, the polysilicon layer is usually used as the trap-rich layer to reduce the PSC effect. Experiments show that compared to AlN films deposited directly on HR-Si, the AlN substrates with polysilicon introduced on HR-Si have less radio frequency (RF) loss. To verify the effect of polysilicon on RF loss, polysilicon films of three different thicknesses and several different roughnesses were introduced. The results show that the thickness of the polysilicon will affect the RF loss, while the roughness has almost no effect on it. The polysilicon trap-rich layer can reduce the RF loss, which gradually becomes smaller as the polysilicon thickness increases.