X-Fab offers foundry service for integrated passive devices

New Products | September 14, 2023

By Peter Clarke

X-Fab Silicon Foundries SE (Tessenderlo, Belgium) has added integrated passive device fabrication to its 130nm RFSOI manufacturing process.

The XIPD process extension makes use of an engineered substrate with a thick copper layer enabling customers to integrate inductors, capacitors and resistors into designs. The XIPD fabrication is supported out X-Fab’s wafer fab at Corbeil-Essonnes, France.

Target applications include 5G and 6G cellular communications and radar and satellite communications where there is an increasing need for wider frequency support.

The XIPD platform can support more compact RF/EMI filtering, matching networks, baluns and couplers. Operation from the sub-6GHz band all the way to the high-end of the millimeter-wave band, can be accommodated.

X-Fab has produced a process design kit (PDK) that supports both the Cadence and Keysight ADS design environments, enabling customers to make simulations of the RF subsystem. Initial prototyping with several key customers has now commenced.

“Though RF semiconductor devices continue to shrink, the passive components that accompany them still remain relatively large. This mismatch doesn’t fit well with the need for sleeker electronic equipment, causing excess board area to be taken up,” said Rudi De Winter, CEO of X-Fab, in statement. “By adopting our XIPD technology, not only is it possible to achieve space savings of multiple orders of magnitude, but it also translates into reductions in the associated costs too. This has the potential to be a real game-changer for our customer base, permitting the co-packaging of active and passive dies together, while achieving high yields.”

X-Fab RF Technology Director, Greg U’Ren, said the company is already working on projects that require 70 to 80GHz operation, that would not be possible using a discrete passive arrangement.