ECE Ph.D. student Vivek Sridharan and his Ph.D. advisor, Rao Tummala, received the Best of Session Award for "Design and Fabrication of Bandpass Filters in Glass Interposer with Through-Package-Vias (TPV)" at the 60th IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference, which was held in Las Vegas last June.

The paper was chosen for this honor by a majority vote of 150 attendants of the session on Filters and TSV-based RF Devices. This honor is shared by his coauthors from Georgia Tech--Sunghwan Min, Venky Sundaram, Fuhan Liu, Hunter Chan, Vijay Sukumaran, and Seunghyun Hwang. Dr. Tummala is the Joseph M. Pettit Chair in Electronics Packaging and is the director of the 3D Systems Packaging Research Center.

This paper demonstrates for the first time RF integration in ultra-thin glass packages with insertion loss comparable to ceramic packages and better than the best organics and silicon interposers. As a result, low-cost, panel-based glass and silicon packages are expected to enable mainstream applications in next generation of ULK ICs and 3D-ICs, leading to ultra-miniaturized electronic and bio-electronic systems. This approach was developed by the Georgia Tech 3D Systems Packaging Research Center in partnership with a consortium of 10 global companies, including Qualcomm, STMicroelectronics, TSMC, Asahi Glass, and Corning Glass.