ABSTRACT

A holistic and multi-disciplinary treatment of the challenges in packaging of MMICs and RFMEMS switches is presented in this thesis. The work carried out aimed at developing the understanding of electrical and mechanical (thermal) aspects of packages used for packaging of high frequency MMICs and MEMS. New low cost and fabrication friendly packaging techniques have been evolved and presented alongwith study of their effect on the performance of MMICs being packaged. The work started with investigation of packaging effects of metal ceramic and ceramic packages on the performance of single pole multi throw switches (SPDT and SP4T). The package structure was EM simulated and optimized to alleviate the performance killers and new package structure was fabricated. The MMICs packaged in new packages have shown remarkable improvement compared to their earlier counterparts. Thermal aspects of MMIC packages and modules has been investigated next. Based on the theory of heat transfer in solids, analysis of a packaged medium power amplifier has been carried out using a commercial CFD solver. Effect of thermal conductivities of materials, boundary conditions and surface finish has been studied on the device channel temperature. The simulated results were validated for IR thermal measurements on the packaged MPA and the results were within 5% error margin. Thermal analysis of a hybrid SPDT switch module has also been carried out to find out the optimum cooling requirements. Heat sink parameters as per the estimated heat dissipation have been designed and maximum module temperature with the module on heat sink has been predicted to be below the operating limit. Low cost packaging techniques for MMIC packaging have been studied next. Two distinct novel candidate techniques have been analyzed and effects of these on the packaged MMICs have been

presented and discussed. The first technique is globtop encapsulation using dielectric encapsulant epoxy. Effect of the encapsulation on various types of MMICs working in broad range of frequencies from L band to X band have been studied. The second technique is packaging of MMICs in a multilayer RF laminate based package fabricated using PCB processing techniques. Performance of the package has been simulated and measured. The package has shown good performance upto 6 GHz which can be extended further by refining the alignment of the layers constituting the package. The final piece of work presented in thesis investigates an easy to mass produce wafer level packaging technique for RFMEMS switches. The technique in based on fabrication of individual microcaps and attaching them over the membrane area of the CPW shunt RFMEMS switches with adhesive bonding. The microcaps were design using EM simulation to optimize microcap cavity height for minimal degradation on switch performance. The microcaps were fabricated using GaAs as well as pyrex glass substrates. RF measurements after attachment of the caps validated the simulations and showed a very little degradation in on-state insertion loss (0.2dB at 40 GHz for GaAs caps and 0.1dB at 25 GHz for glass caps). The return loss and off-state isolation remain largely unaffected.