The Ideal Switch® with Advanced Glass Packaging

There has been a lot of work done over the past decade showing the advantages of using glass-based packaging for many microelectronics applications. Much of this work has been motivated by advantages provided by the material properties of glass. As an insulator, packaging enables devices with low electrical loss relative to semiconducting materials, such as silicon, as the operational frequency increases. Furthermore, the manufacturing processes for glass substrates provide numerous other potential benefits. Some glasses, such as fused silica (FS) offer extremely low loss tangent making it well suited for high frequency applications to minimize electrical loss in the system. Other glass types, such as those used for Display applications, are alkali free, have a coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) close to Si and are fabricated in both thin and large (e.g. panel) form factors. This provides excellent opportunities for process cost savings for large substrates and interposers, while also maintaining excellent electrical performance. With all of these potential advantages in enhanced microelectronic performance, there have been numerous efforts to establish the manufacture of glass-based devices, but supply chain readiness has hampered the development of a robust supply of these solutions. Menlo Microsystems has established a glass device based supply chain to enable the volume manufacture of the Ideal Switch® technology. Below we describe the device and discuss some of the work Menlo has done to transition into production and packaging of the glass Ideal Switch.