Electrical modeling of RFIC packages up to 12 GHz

In this paper, a broadband vector-network-analyzer (VNA) measurement technique is developed to establish the equivalent circuits for RFIC (Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit) packages up to 12 GHz. The models can be used to evaluate various package effects, such as resonance, coupling, impedance mismatch and frequency-dependent losses, at higher microwave frequencies. The research takes up measurement of the two-port scattering parameters for any pair of coupled traces, from which an equivalent coupled lumped model can be extracted. Then a step-by-step optimization scheme is employed to construct the complete equivalent circuits for the packages, which can be used in the SPICE simulator to perform the signal integrity analysis in RFIC designs. A real example on electrical modeling of a TSSOP16 package has been demonstrated