RF system front ends need to be mounted on a circuit board and interconnected to other devices such as antennas and surrounding circuitry functions. Providing suitable RF performing interconnects between or within devices on multi-layer construction has been done typically with doped semiconductors, copper, and occasionally other conductors. This paper discusses the use of organic printed circuit board MEMS switches and varactors, and the use of multi-wall carbon nanotubes as transmission lines and antennas. Carbon nanotube active transistors use single wall carbon nanotubes (SWCNT) with efforts to improve percentages of semiconducting structures. Interconnects are needed not only to connect CNT devices to each other, but to larger structures in order to be able to use subsystems that integrate CNT devices, large scale multifunction ICs, and RF devices used in RF front ends, including antennas. This paper addresses the use of organic substrates as the media for integration of MEMS, interconnects to devices on the substrate, and planar antennas. These methods will be required until complete assembly of all devices and interconnects can be done with processes at the nano-scale level, which is assumed to still need efficient radiative antenna structures at a larger scale for commonly used consumer wireless products.

Date Published: 5 May 2010
PDF: 12 pages
Proc. SPIE 7679, Micro- and Nanotechnology Sensors, Systems, and Applications II, 76790M (5 May 2010); doi: 10.1117/12.851377

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 7679:
Micro- and Nanotechnology Sensors, Systems, and Applications II
Thomas George; M. Saif Islam; Achyut Kumar Dutta, Editor(s)