Automated Design Flow for Millimeter-Wave Antenna in Fan-Out Wafer Level Packaging

Abstract

Millimeter-wave (mmWave), occupying in the extremely high frequency band (30 GHz to 300 GHz) of radio frequency spectrum, provides a new paradigm of wireless communication in numerous application areas. In order to realize such a high-performance system, the designers must incorporate various sub-systems such as antenna array, antenna feeds, and RF chips/chiplets together. To this end, the technology of antenna in package (AiP) is proposed, in which RF chips and multiple antennas are integrated in a single package to further increase the data rate [1], [2]. Among the existing package solutions, fan-out wafer level packaging (FOWLP) technology becomes an outstanding one with higher design flexibilities and better electrical performance [3]. However, as a compact system consisting of several correlated components from different physical domains, the design of AiP is challenging. As a result, an automated design flow is imperative, which has been no reported one to date yet. In this paper, we propose an AiP reference design flow for system integrators to optimize these systems for challenging size, cost and reliability targets.