Development of liquid crystalline polymer (LCP) surface mount packages for millimeter-wave applications.

摘要

Millimeter-wave electronic packaging in is becoming an increasingly important as reliability, cost, and performance become increasingly important. Currently, ceramics are the dominant packaging technology for millimeter-wave packaging. However, ceramics are heavier, expensive, and difficult to process. Liquid crystal polymer (LCP) has emerged as a competing technology providing essentially the same performance as ceramics in terms or reliability but at a much lower cost. LCP also allows the advantages of a multilayer circuit design. This dissertation investigates the use of multi-layer circuit design to improve reliability and design novel bandpass package feedthroughs.;Lumped element filter feedthroughs provide another capacitively coupled feedthrough. This feedthrough consists of a metal insulator metal (MIM) capacitor and a series inductor. A 1mil layer in the LCP package substrate is used for the MIM capacitor, while bond wires and a high impedance line provide the series inductance. This feedthrough provides performance comparable to that of the coupled line feedthroughs, but with a much smaller footprint.;Finally, the use of LCP in V-band (50--75GHz) modules will be investigated. V-band shows great promise in high speed short range file transfer. A V-band power module using T-junctions to combine the output power of two V-band power amplifiers was investigated. The loss of the module was measured and provides for an additional 2.1 dB in output power over and individual V-band amplifiers.;Vias are the main source of reliability issues. One way to reduce the number of vias required is to capacitively couple the signal out of the package. Coupled line band pass feedthroughs are investigated first. Made possible by the thin film capabilities offered by LCP, coupled line bandpass feedthroughs offer low loss broadband feedthroughs, while potentially eliminating a via and providing inherent DC isolation.