Abstract

An emerging method for 3D integration is to use nanomembranes (NMs), which are crystalline semiconductor materials (Si, GaAs, SiGe, etc) that have been released from their substrates and redeposited on foreign, flexible or flat substrates enabling the best features of disparate materials. Although they are in fact crystalline in nature and possess the electronic/photonic properties of bulk material, they are flexible, deformable, and conformable. An obvious choice is silicon-on-insulator (SOI). SOI provides, beyond its application in the Si industry, the ultimate platform for exploring novel science and technological advancements in this class of nanomaterial. In SOI, a SiO2 layer is interspersed between a thin crystalline top Si layer and the bottom Si wafer; the ability to etch this buried oxide selectively creates the nanomembranes. When released from the oxide, this layer can form extremely flexible strain-engineered thin nanomembranes with thicknesses from several hundred nanometers to less than 10 nm, and in various shapes. In this presentation we will show designs and fabricated devices that use NM integration approaches to realize devices that perform above 200GHz.

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