LTCC-Based Highly Integrated Millimeter-Wave Receiver Front-End Module

This paper presents the design and fabrication of a highly integrated Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) receiver front-end module. This LTCC module is a dual channel receiver module, works at Ka-band, and fabricated including six Ferro A6M dielectric layers and five metal layers, contains eight embedded resistors and eight MMICs. All MMICs are mounted into pre-making cavities on the top surface of the LTCC substrate. Three slot coupled waveguide-to-microstrip transitions are integrated at LTCC substrate to realize RF and LO signal input. The developed module is highly integrated and reliable, which has a compact size of 58 × 50 × 22 mm³ (including the metal cavity). Each channel of the receiver has the noise figure of less than 9 dB and the gain of more than 24 dB at Ka-band.