Abstract
parylene-N is used as a dielectric layer to create ultra low-loss 3-D vertical interconnects and coplanar waveguide (CPW) transmission lines on a CMOS substrate. Insertion loss of 0.013 dB for a 3-D vertical interconnect through a 15- m-thick parylene-N layer and 0.56 dB/mm for a 50- CPW line on the parylene-N layer (compared to 1.85 dB/mm on a standard CMOS substrate) are measured at 40 GHz. L-shaped, U-shaped, and T-junction CPW structures are also fabricated with underpasses that eliminate the discontinuities arisen from the slot-line mode and are characterized up to 40 GHz. A 3-D low-noise amplifier using these post-processed structures on a 0.13- m CMOS technology is also presented along with the investigation of parasitic effects for accurate simulation of such a 3-D circuit. The 3-D circuit implementation reduces the attenuation per unit length of the transmission lines, while preserving the CMOS chip area (in this specific design) by approximately 25%. The 3-D amplifier measures a gain of 13 dB at 2 GHz with 3-dB bandwidth of 500 MHz, noise figure of 3.3 dB, and output 1-dB compression point of + 4.6 dBm. Room-temperature processing, simple fabrication, low-loss performance, and compatibility with the CMOS process make this technology a suitable choice for future 3-D CMOS and BiCMOS monolithic microwave integrated circuit applications that currently suffer from high substrate loss and crosstalk.
Keywords
Audio frequency amplifiers, Bandpass filters, Bandwidth compression, BiCMOS technology, Computer crime, coplanar waveguides, Electric lines, low noise amplifiers, Microwave circuits, microwave integrated circuits, Monolithic microwave integrated circuits, Three dimensional, Transmission line theory
Date of this Version
January 2010
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TMTT.2009.2036394
Published in:
IEEE Transactions on Microwave Theory and Techniques 58,1 (2010) 48-56;
Comments
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