DEVELOPMENT OF K-BAND FRONT-END DEVICES FOR BROAD-BAND WIRELESS COMMUNICATION-SYSTEMS USING MILLIMETER-WAVE FLIP-CHIP IC TECHNOLOGY

This paper describes new millimeter-wave IC's based on flip-chip bondi ng using micro bumps on a low cost silicon substrate, named millimeter -wave Aip-chip IC's (MFIC's). They have significant advantages such as good performance, low cost and excellent flexibility in the active de vice selection which makes them superior to conventional monolithic mi crowave integrated circuits (MMIC's). In order to demonstrate these ad vantages, a K-band front-end block for epsilon. broadband wireless com munication equipment was designed and fabricated. This front-end block consists of four MFIC chips: a low noise amplifier (LNA), a down conv erter and two medium power amplifiers. These chips are designed to sat isfy stable operation conditions using a simplified model derived fbr micro bump bonding (MBB). In experimental measurements; the LNA using heterojunction field-effect transistors (HFET's) had an 18 dB gain, th e down converter using an HFET had a 9.5 dB conversion loss, and two p ower amplifiers using heterojunction bipolar transistors (HBT's) had s aturated powers of 13.0 dBm and 11.7 dBm, respectively. The performanc e for each of the developed IC's agreed with the designed values, and satisfied circuit requirements. These results show that the MFIC techn ique is a potential technology for manufacturing multifunctional milli meter-wave IC's.