Ultrathin, Electrically Small Noise Suppression Sheet for Microwave Cavities of 3-D Integrated Circuits: Design Methodology and Realization

Abstract

Miniaturized microwave cavities constructed by the parallel-plate waveguide (PPW) becomes one of the main propagation pathways of the radio-frequency interference (RFI) in 3-D integrated circuits. It is still challenging to suppress RFI in the practical cavities, where the space is extremely constrained. In this work, the working mechanism and design method of the noise suppression sheet (NSS) is quantitatively studied, serving as an efficient approach to suppress RFI within an electrically small size in these microwave cavities. The analysis is based on the dispersion relationship derivation of the NSS-loaded PPW structure. Both the derived formulas and the numerical study reveal that the imaginary part of the permeability, that is, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu _{i}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , of the NSS plays a key role in increasing the reflection and attenuation loss, and thus obtaining a high RFI suppression level. Further study indicates even when the NSS’s profile is lower than 10% of the cavity’s height and the length is lower than <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$0.1\lambda _{0}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> , its suppression level up to 10 dB can be well accomplished, which is deemed difficult to achieve by using conventional methods. Moreover, this method is, respectively, applied in three practical engineering scenarios for the RFI suppression, that is, heatsink package above a chip, power distributed network (PDN), and flexible circuit. Good agreement is observed between the measurement results and the simulated ones, which confirmed the efficacy of our quantitatively developed NSS. The proposed method is promising for broad industrial applications, such as tiny chip packages, multi-channel systems, and flexible electronics.