Encapsulated Organic Package Technology for Wideband Integration of Heterogeneous MMICs

Abstract

The heterogeneous integration of silicon germanium (SiGe) and gallium arsenide (GaAs) technologies is presented using a novel encapsulated packaging approach with organic laminates. The combination of unique and optimally matched interconnects for each die, and the low-loss nature of the organic substrates, provides wideband performance and system design flexibility. A hybrid receiver front-end is realized on multilayer Rogers RO3003 to demonstrate this concept, incorporating a flip-chip bonded SiGe low-noise amplifier and a ribbon-bonded GaAs mixer. The simulated 3-dB bandwidth of the receiver is 4.5–14.5 GHz with a maximum conversion gain of 1.2 dB. Measured results for the packaged module show a 4–14-GHz 3-dB bandwidth and 0.9-dB maximum conversion gain. These results validate that the package is indeed low loss and preserves system performance over the entire bandwidth. The receiver also exhibits a double side band NFmin of 4 dB and a maximum $P_{\text {1 dB, input}}$ of −5.5 dBm. This is the first time that heterogeneous semiconductor technologies have been integrated and encapsulated within a multilayer organic package using different interconnects for each chip to form a receiver. Moreover, the receiver achieves the widest bandwidth among heterogeneous receivers reported to date.