Glass Integrated Passive Device Research Articles

Laser-drilling formation of through-glass-via (TGV) on polymer-laminated glass

A three-dimensional (3D) glass integrated passive device (IPD) is an evolutionally advanced configuration to dramatically reduce the electronics form factor and manufacturing cost of current IPDs by introducing ultra-thin glass with through-glass-vias (TGVs). A defect-free TGV formation technology in polymer-laminated glass substrates is required to realize a highly reliable 3D glass IPD. This paper discusses mechanisms of each defect formation in the use of several types of lasers to explore suitable technology for defect-free drilling in polymer-laminated glass.

Design of Microwave Dual-Band Rat-Race Couplers in Printed-Circuit Board and GIPD Technologies

In this paper, the dual-band $\pi $ -section is proposed to design three types of dual-band rat-race couplers. Except for the experimental verification by the printed-circuit board process, the miniaturized dual-band coupler is also implemented in the glass integrated passive device (GIPD) technology to reveal the practical value. The $\pi $ -section is realized by a section of the transmission line (TL) with two reactive shunt elements at the bilateral ends. The design formulas of the 90° and 270 $^{\circ }\pi $ -sections are derived, and their corresponding design figures are then plotted for simplifying design procedures. Moreover, the reactive shunt elements of the 90 $^{\circ }\pi $ -section can be implemented by series $LC$ resonators, while those of the 270 $^{\circ }\pi $ -section can be realized by series or parallel $LC$ resonators. As six 90 $^{\circ }\pi $ -sections are integrated to form a dual-band coupler, the band ratio, which is defined as the center frequency of the second passband dividing by that of the first passband, covers from 1.38 to 3.16. By setting the band ratio to 2 and constructing the dual-band rat-race coupler by three 90 $^{\circ }\pi $ -sections and one 270 $^{\circ }\pi $ -section with parallel $LC$ resonators, two sets of the adjacent series and parallel resonators can cancel each other to reduce the power loss. Consequently, this dual-band coupler uses only two series $LC$ resonators. In addition, the proposed dual-band coupler can be miniaturized by replacing microstrips with the complementary-conducting-strip TLs. It only occupies a 10% circuit size of the conventional one at the center frequency of the first passband. This miniaturized approach is also demonstrated in the GIPD technology.

On‐chip miniaturised wideband rat‐race coupler using integrated passive device technology

In this study, a miniaturised wideband rat-race coupler using glass integrated passive device (GIPD) technology is studied. The circuit miniaturisation is achieved using slow-wave synthesised coplanar waveguides (CPWs). For wideband operation, a compact CPW phase inverter is developed and integrated. At the centre frequency, 12 GHz, the proposed rat-race coupler is only 6.5% the size of a conventional 1.5-λg ring coupler with the same GIPD technology; the fractional bandwidths, on the other hand, reach 65 and 32%, respectively, at the sum and difference ports. The coupler shows good amplitude and phase balances, with the transmission loss around 0.7–1.1 dB at the centre frequency.

A low-phase-noise Ka-band push-push voltage-controlled oscillator using CMOS/glass-integrated passive device technologies.

In this paper, a Ka-band CMOS push-push voltage- controlled oscillator (VCO) integrated into a glass-integrated passive device (GIPD) process is presented. The transformer, λ/4 transmission line, and inductors of the VCO are realized in the GIPD process, achieving superior performances, and therefore improve the phase noise of the VCO. Moreover, the transformer-based VCO is a differential Hartley topology to further reduce the phase noise and chip area. Operating at 1.8 V supply voltage, the VCO core consumes merely 3.8 mW of dc power. The measured phase noise is -109.18 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the 30.84 GHz oscillation frequency. The push-push VCO also demonstrates a 24.5 dB fundamental rejection, and exhibits an 8.4% tuning range. Compared with recently published CMOS-based VCOs, it is observed that the proposed VCO exhibits excellent performance under low power consumption.

Low-Noise and High-Linearity Wideband CMOS Receiver Front-End Stacked With Glass Integrated Passive Devices

This paper presents a stacked RF front-end (RFE) package for wideband receiver applications. While having a power consumption of 18 mW, the flipped CMOS chip consisting of a low-noise amplifier and a quadrature down-conversion mixer stacks on a glass integrated passive device (GIPD) substrate, subsequently achieving a noise figure of 2.2-2.8 dB and a conversion gain of 23-25 dB over 1-6 GHz. Moreover, the RFE package uses a GIPD balun with a high common-mode rejection ratio and a post-distortion linearizer in the CMOS mixer, subsequently resulting in an IIP2 of 57-68 dBm and an IIP3 of -5.2- -3.5 dBm over the entire operating band. This paper also elucidates how coupling between the flipped CMOS chip and GIPD balun affects the RFE linearity. Fabricated with 0.18-μm CMOS technology, the flipped CMOS chip is packaged on the GIPD substrate with a footprint area of 1.8×1.8 mm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> .

Design of Antenna on Glass Integrated Passive Device for WLAN Applications

An antenna miniaturization technique that can substantially miniaturize an antenna to allow its incorporation into a compact package for WLAN (2.4-2.484 GHz) applications is proposed. For this purpose, the semiconductor-based glass integrated passive device (GIPD) manufacturing technology is adopted. However, the inherently lower dielectric constant and more limited number of layers that can be used in a GIPD than low temperature co-fired ceramic (LTCC) pose a serious challenge in miniaturization. To facilitate the design, an equivalent circuit approach is applied to the loop-based antenna in which the structure is conveniently integrated with the ground trace in the semiconductor fabrication process to improve both miniaturization and radiation efficiency. The loop antenna incorporates a strip that is capacitively fed by the coplanar waveguide (CPW) feedline, and the combined equivalent circuit shows that without detuning the structure of the antenna, resonance can be obtained simply by adjusting the equivalent capacitance between the feedline and structure. Furthermore, the ground of the CPW is part of the antenna, so its length affects the resonant frequency of the antenna. Under these conditions, the resonant length of the loop antenna is not necessarily one wavelength, so the antenna can be made electrically small. Therefore, the antenna proposed herein has dimensions 2.4 × 1.1 (0.019 λ0 × 0.009 λ0) mm2, occupying only 2.4% of the package area (9.7 × 9.7 mm2), allowing the flexibility of the integration of other components in the package. The package is mounted on the printed circuit board (PCB) with a ground plane of size 100 × 50 mm2. The effect of the size of the ground plane is discussed. The radiation efficiency is 58% in the WLAN band (2.4-2.484 GHz). Therefore, the proposed method is very useful for designing a package antenna.

VERY COMPACT FULL DIFFERENTIAL BANDPASS FILTER WITH TRANSFORMER INTEGRATED USING INTEGRATED PASSIVE DEVICE TECHNOLOGY

In this study, a very compact, second-order, full differential bandpass filter is presented. To achieve compact circuit area and system-in-package (SiP) applications, the transformer structure is integrated using integrated passive device (IPD) technology on a glass substrate. The coupled resonator synthesis method is used to achieve the bandpass filter design and suitably adjust the tapped feed-lines to obtain good impedance match at all ports. The area (1.27 mm×1.27mm) of the bandpass filter is effectively reduced, and the performance, as measured by insertion loss (2.5 dB) and CMRR (> 30 dB), is still acceptable with such a compact area. Most importantly, this full differential bandpass filter is also suitable for SiP applications, as other studies implemented using glass IPD technology have demonstrated.