Design and implementation of system-on-package for radio and mixed-signal applications

Emerging wireless applications for logistics, intelligent home networks, smart dusts, wireless body area networks (WBAN) will need integration and fusion of a diversity of technologies, which may include digital CMOS circuits, analog/RF circuits, sensors/MEMS, embedded software and memories, antenna, displays, polymer, packaging and interconnections, new materials and new integration process. System-on-package (SoP) is considered as a promising solution for the fundamental integration platform for such applications. In this paper, we show how SoP technology can address the integration platform for these applications and how this can be done in a better way than system-on-chip integration. We first demonstrate the integration process off SoP in liquid-crystal polymer materials. We see that liquid-crystal-polymer is a promising material for low cost RF SoP. We then demonstrate some design examples. The first one is an integrated 5GHz RF receiver front-end in liquid crystal polymer. Due to high quality of passive components in SoP, superior RF performance is found in this module. In the second example, we address several critical design issues for on-chip versus off-chip passives in a multi-band multi-standard radio for beyond 3G applications. We find that not only RF performance can be improved. Cost benefits are also obvious for such a complex radio. Chip-package co-design for smart parasitic absorption is demonstrated through an RF module for an ultra-wide band radio in gigabit wireless. Concept of a SoP pacemaker in a WBAN is shown. Finally, we discuss some system level integration issues and we show how a system can be smartly partitioned for SoP so that we can obtain an optimal total solution for low-cost and good-performance wireless integration.