Dual-band stacked folded shorted patch antenna

A novel stacked folded shorted patch antenna for dual-band operation is presented. It has impedance bandwidths (SWR<2) of 22.9 and 20.3% in the lower and the upper bands, respectively. It is 0.0461lambda_L in height and 0.27lambda_L in length, where lambda_L is the free space wavelength at the centre frequency of the lower band. Therefore, it is very suitable for today's multi-band wireless communication systems.     

A 1-V 86-mW-RX 53-mW-TX Single-Chip CMOS Transceiver for WLAN IEEE 802.11a

A 1-V WLAN IEEE 802.11a CMOS transceiver integrates all building blocks on a single chip including a transformer-feedback VCO and a stacked divider for the frequency synthesizer and 8-bit IQ ADCs and 8-bit IQ DACs. Fabricated in a 0.18-mum CMOS process and operated at a single 1-V supply, the receiver and the transmitter consume 85.7 mW and 53.2 mW, including the frequency synthesizer, respectively. The total chip area with pads is 12.5 mm².     

Gigabit Ethernet switches using a shared buffer architecture

Gigabit Ethernet networks have seen great demand in recent years. This growth was fueled by both an increase in port speed at the client side and new applications in MAN and WAN space. In this article, we report a highly integrated Ethernet switch IC design that supports 12 gigabit ports and one 10 Gb port. All packet memory and search memory are integrated on chip. A deeply pipelined structure with parallel memory access is employed to achieve wirespeed search performance. A flexible policy engine is designed to allow packet filtering and modification. A novel tail buffer architecture is proposed to address the variable packet length issue in the shared buffer architecture. Custom mixed-signal circuits are incorporated to implement the 10G Ethernet interface in XGMII. The chip integrates 70 million transistors in a 16 mm /spl times/ 15 mm die using 0.18 /spl mu/m CMOS technology. The chip has been tested to verify the wirespeed searching and switching performance.     

OMVPE growth of P-type GaN using solution Cp2Mg

Bis(cyclopentadienyl)magnesium (Cp₂Mg) is a common source for p-type doping in GaN and AlInGaP materials. It is a white crystalline solid with very low vapor pressure, leading to transport problems similar to solid trimethyindium (TMI). Some of these problems can be alleviated by a newly developed source-solution magnesocene, Cp₂Mg, dissolved in a solvent that is essentially nonvolatile. In this paper, we report the growth and comparative results of Mg-doped GaN grown by OMVPE using solid and solution Cp₂Mg. Using both sources, we optimized parameters to obtain high-quality GaN growth with hole concentrations up to 1 10¹⁸/cm³.     

High-speed operation of single-quantum-well lasers with large gaincompression

It is shown that the overdamped response of single-quantum-well lasers due to a large gain compression can be countered by the destabilizing effect of an intracavity saturable absorber. Modulation bandwidths (3 dB) of up to 13 GHz for single-quantum well lasers were obtained using this technique     

Self-adaptive biasing technique for microwave bipolar amplifier linearisation

A novel linearised bipolar amplifier topology, integrating both reduction of baseband distortion and self-adaptive biasing techniques, is presented. The linearising circuit suppresses more than 25 dB of the spectral regrowth for the first-order sidelobes and reduces up to 36% DC bias power of the amplifying transistor     

Effects of underfill material properties on the reliability ofsolder bumped flip chip on board with imperfect underfill encapsulants

Three different types of underfill imperfections were considered; i.e., (1) interfacial delamination between the underfill encapsulant and the solder mask on the PCB (crack initiated at the tip of underfill fillet), (2) interfacial delamination between the chip and the underfill encapsulant (crack initiated at the chip corner), and (3) the same as (2) but without the underfill fillet. Five different combinations of coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) and Young's modulus with the aforementioned delaminations were investigated. A fracture mechanics approach was employed for computational analysis. The strain energy release rate at the crack tip and the maximum accumulated equivalent plastic strain in the solder bumps of all cases were evaluated as indices of reliability. Besides, mechanical shear tests were performed to characterize the shear strength at the underfill-solder mask interface and the underfill-chip passivation interface. The main objective of the present study is to achieve a better understanding in the thermo-mechanical behavior of flip chip on board (FCOB) assemblies with imperfect underfill encapsulants     

Taguchi design of experiment for wafer bumping by stencil printing

Taguchi experiments are designed and carried out with five critical factors that influence the solder bumping of a 200 mm (8 in) wafer by the stencil printing method. These factors are: paste types, squeeze forces, snap-off heights, aperture shapes, and aspect ratios. They are varied to form a two-level L8 orthogonal array experiment. Analysis of mean (ANOM) and analysis of variance (ANOVA) are used to choose the most influential factors. After fixing the most influential factors, a two-level L4 orthogonal array experiment is followed to optimize the remaining material and process parameters. Important results are summarized in this paper which could be very useful for wafer bumping with the stencil printing method     

Recent fluid–structure interaction modeling challenges in IC encapsulation – A review

The rapid development of computing software has facilitated multifarious research in integrated circuit (IC) packaging. Complicated and complex processes can be visualized via simulation modeling with this software. The applications of aided software enhance the fundamental physicochemical understanding and visualization of the IC encapsulation process. In this article, fluid–structure interaction (FSI) during IC encapsulation through computer-aided simulation is reviewed based on the amount of substantial work conducted from the past decades to the present. FSI phenomena in various IC encapsulations, such as wire sweep, paddle shift, lead frame deformation, IC chip, and through-silicon via (TSV) deformation, is considered in the review. The significance and challenges of FSI analysis are also highlighted in this article.     

On the Diversity Order of a General Cooperative Relaying Communication System

Cooperative communication technology exploiting distributed spatial diversity is a promising solution for the future high data-rate cellular and ad-hoc wireless communications. To characterize the performance of a cooperative network, the cooperative diversity is commonly used. In this paper, we revisit the concept of diversity and look into the essence of cooperative diversity. We analyze the diversity performance of a general cooperative relaying system with multiple branches. Moreover, each branch consists of one or more hops. Unlike in other analyses, the assumptions that each node being only equipped with a single antenna and that all channel characteristics belonging to the same family are NOT required in our study. Using the decode-and-forward (DF) relaying protocol as an illustration, we provide analytical results on the diversity gain and the coding gain. The results also encompass most of the existing results as special cases. We further show the relationship between the diversity order of a branch and those of the constituent links; and the relationship between the diversity order of the network and those of the constituent branches. In particular, we show that for the uncoded DF protocol, the full diversity order can be achieved by using simple hard-decision detection at the destination. The requirement is to set appropriate signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) thresholds for the multi-hop branches. To improve the bandwidth efficiency, we also randomly select one branch, among those branches satisfying the SNR-threshold requirement, for the transmission. We show that such a scheme accomplishes the full diversity order and produces a good error performance.