Glass and structured glass for high frequency electronics above 10GHz

Glasses are a material class on its own. A glass is a frozen (supercooled) liquid and is always produced via a liquid melt. Therefore the surface tension of the liquid state allows to manufacture glasses with surface roughness values below 1nm without any post processing step. Driven by the semiconductor industry cost efficient metallization processes on panel level (510mm x 515mm and larger) are currently developed, which show excellent adhesion of order 400 N/m and more. This allows to build electronic components and packages which can make use of the smooth glass surface. Glasses suitable for industrial glass panel production can be optimized with respect to their dielectric loss. We report on the status of the development of a low-loss glass with a loss-tangent tan(δ)@10GHz below 0.002 for microwave applications. Laser based structuring processes are highly accurate and are able to cut out hollow wave guide structures in glass with nearly ideally straight side walls. This allows to combine hollow waveguide components like e.g. filters and resonators with heterogeneous integration of active and passive components on the same glass substrate. In the current paper a number of examples for frequencies up to 130GHz are shown.