Silicon-on-Organic Integration of a 2.4–GHz VCO Using High-Q Copper Inductors and Solder-Bumped Flip Chip Technology (original) (raw)
2009, IEEE Transactions on Components and Packaging Technologies
High-Q copper inductors were fabricated on low-cost and low-loss bismaleimide triazine (BT) and glass substrate using electroplating process. A differential LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) circuit was designed using these high-Q inductors at 2.4 GHz. Flip chip and multichip module (MCM) technologies were applied to assemble the active chips on BT and glass substrate. The inductors exhibited Q-factor as high as 25 at 2.4 GHz. VCOs with copper inductors on BT and glass substrate had phase noise of 108 dBc/Hz at 600 kHz offset for a 2.4-GHz carrier, which is 6-dB improvement compared with the one with on-chip Al inductors. There was almost no substrate loss for inductors on BT and glass substrates. The effect of fabrication defects and solder joint resistance were also investigated. This technique can be extended to other building blocks, thus realizing integration of the whole RF system. Index Terms-Complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS), copper, flip chip devices, inductors, integrated circuit packaging, voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs). I. INTRODUCTION T HE rapid growth of wireless communication market has led to increasing demand for the low-cost high-performance and compact radio-frequency (RF) and microwave front-end integrated circuits. While the active devices benefit more and more from the ongoing scaling of the VLSI technology, the passive components become a hurdle of the circuit design due to the poor on-chip performance and large occupied area. Inductors are key elements in many RF circuits such as impedance matching network (IMN), filter, and voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) [1], [2]. The existing integration Manuscript
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