As the frequency of RF packages climb up and beyond 60 GHz, microstrip and waveguide line widths diminish with substrate thickness and the limitations of traditional interconnect bonding techniques reach their limitations. Printed 3D Interconnects made with Aerosol Jet® printing provide package designers and RF engineers a new tool to tailor the impedance of transition interconnects, designing the loss characteristics to the application need and eliminating the need to compensate for poor signal through loss and back reflection behavior driven by impedance mismatch. Printed 3D interconnects made with Aerosol Jet can be digitally designed to be any shape or thickness and with line widths as thin as 10 microns and thinner than 1 micron it is capable of handling RF interconnect needs well above 100GHz. All of this enables the interconnect itself to be designed into the package, similar to the microstrip or die circuit design it will be interconnecting. Finally, the interconnects are conformal to the surface of the package, minimizing trace length and eliminating air gaps between the interconnect and the substrates ground plane lowering transition loss by up to 50%.
Read more about the performance benefits of printed interconnects here:
Blog Article – “In search of better performing interconnects for mmWave applications”
White Paper – “Aerosol Jet Printed 3D Interconnects Enable mmWave Applications over 100 GHz”