Surface mountable liquid crystal polymer package with vertical via transition compensating wire inductance up to V-band

A high performance V-band surface mountable packaging structure has been proposed and demonstrated. We enabled the use of liquid crystal polymer (LCP) as a low-cost SMT millimeter-wave package. This package employed the wire bonding technique as the RF interconnect, and the vertical via as the vertical signal transition, despite it being meant for application up to V-band. The optimized vertical transition structure consisting of the vertical via and high-impedance transmission lines (TRLs) was designed to form a low-pass impedance matching network compensating for the parasitic inductance of the bonding wire. The overall packaging structure, including a bond wire, a vertical via and a solder joint, achieved excellent RF characteristics and a low insertion loss of less than 0.6 dB at 65 GHz. The adoption of widely used conventional technology such as a general printed circuit board (PCB) wiring process and a low-cost plastic substrate makes it possible to realize cost-effective millimeter-wave equipment.