Title:  Modeling, Design and Fabrication of Miniaturized, High Performance and Integrated Passive Components for 5G and mm-Wave Applications

Committee:

Dr. Rao Tummala, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Madhavan Swaminathan, ECE

Dr. Andrew Peterson, ECE

Dr. Gregory Durgin, ECE

Dr. Raj Pulugurtha, FIU

Abstract: The objective of the proposed research is to model, design, fabricate and characterize integrated passive components for 5G and mm-wave applications on advanced substrates such as laminated glass. These passive components include filters, power dividers and antenna arrays, diplexers and integrated passive components. Glass substrate is emerging as an ideal candidate to realize mm-wave technologies. This is mainly because of its low loss, superior dimensional stability, ability to form fine-pitch, low-cost through-vias, stability to temperature and humidity, matched coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) with devices and availability in large-area, low-cost panels. Glass packaging enables major advances in mm-wave component design rules to achieve both miniaturization and performance. The primary focus of this research is to utilize advanced 3D glass package integration to design, fabricate and demonstrate mm-wave components with footprint smaller than twice the free-space wavelength corresponding to the operating frequency, and less than 200-microns z-height. Such components can be seamlessly integrated into RF front-end modules (FEMs), as integrated passive devices (IPDs) or as embedded thin-film components. The components are fabricated using semi-additive patterning (SAP) process with less than 5% variation in dimensions, which results in an excellent correlation between simulated and measured results. Thus, the superiority of glass based IPDs for RF FEMs is demonstrated.