This article has been accepted for inclusion in a future issue of this journal. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination. IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS 1 RF MEMS Passives on High-Resistivity Silicon Substrates

Abstract—Diverse RF passive devices and microelectro- me-chanical systems (MEMS) can be monolithically integrated on a high-resistivity silicon (HR-Si) substrate. However, parasitic surface conduction (PSC) at the interface of HR-Si and a silicon dioxide passivation layer reduces the effective substrate resistivity, which in turn results in deterioration of the device quality factor and non-linearity. Trap-rich HR-Si has been proposed as a low substrate loss alternative, eliminating the prob-lems associated with PSC. However, the full potential of trap-rich HR-Si as a common platform for implementing MEMS passives is not fully explored. In this letter, we evaluate the effectiveness of the trap-rich layer by comparing the frequency response of a number of RF passive devices fabricated on standard and trap-rich HR-Si substrates. In addition, we suggest an electromagnetic (EM) simu-lation setup that can be used to efficiently and accurately simulate the device performance. Index Terms—Electromagnetic simulation, parasitic surface conduction, RF MEMS passives, trap-rich HR-Si substrate. I