Ruff,
Thanks for the link previously. No idea if these two links have anything to do with CDMA networks directly.
Lucent spin-off focuses on RF integration
By Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(05/12/00, 1:13 p.m. EST)
MURRAY HILL, N.J. ? As Intarsia Corp. was rolling out its RF design services this week, Lucent Microelectronics formally announced the spinoff of SyChip Inc. The venture will tap proprietary silicon substrate designs based on co-fired ceramics and hybrids developed at Lucent Bell Labs.
Dennis Peasenell is president and chief executive of the venture, and Bell Labs Fellow King Tai is chief executive. SyChip is jointly funded by Lucent's new ventures group and APack Technologies Inc., a Taiwanese specialist in microsystem integration.
Moses Asom, chief operating officer of the new company, said that APack was one of a handful of Pacific Rim technology licensing partners to which Lucent's development group turned after Lucent Microelectronics closed a fab used by the group. APack invested as a way to gain early access to chip-scale packaging technologies pursued by SyChip.
Tai said his Lucent group had analyzed at least four candidate materials for planar substrates and had concluded the proprietary silicon substrate technologies developed at Bell Labs had the lowest dielectric losses. SyChip can continue to use a Lucent wafer fab for R&D but will turn to APack and other offshore hybrid vendors as products reach production.
SyChip will target personal communications and Internet appliance wireless devices for its new technologies. It will use 6-inch wafers rather than the glass panels that Intarsia will be using as a substrate, but claims to be able to integrate between 50 and 100 passive components on such wafers, allowing integration of RF and IF components into extremely small areas.
Melding techniques
SyChip will rely on a combination of chip-on-chip and flip-chip techniques, using advanced solder bump concepts that will allow multiple packages to be stacked vertically. Chip-scale modules incorporating the stacking methods will be developed for Bluetooth, global positioning system (GPS) and General Packet Radio Service markets. The module manufacturing techniques will be licensed to offshore and domestic manufacturers.
Although the silicon substrate may be useful in markets outside RF, SyChip will stick to high-volume opportunities in the 900-MHz-to-2.4-GHz region for now, exploring later opportunities at frequencies up to 5 GHz.
Applications outside RF may not come until the company is sure it can serve very large volumes in consumer wireless markets.
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Intarsia pushes design environment for RF thin-film integration
By Loring Wirbel
EE Times
(05/11/00, 3:25 p.m. EST)
FREMONT, Calif. ? Hoping to move its RF thin-film integration effort to a new level of market acceptance, Intarsia Corp. will disseminate a standard electronic design environment called PassPort to external developers working on passive and discrete integration in markets such as cellular handsets.
Intarsia developed a thin-film-on-glass process at a former Hyundai flat-panel facility, and spent two years perfecting the method it plans to move into micromachined device integration and other areas.
The company will show samples of the first standard-product fruit of its effort to PCS handset developers this spring. The 4 x 4 x 1.2-mm low-noise amp module achieves a noise range of 1.1 to 0.8 dB over the entire 1.5- to 2.7-GHz frequency range used in PCS systems.
While the new LNA module, based on pseudomorphic high-electron mobility transistor processes, plays an important part in the launch of Intarsia's standard-product business, executive vice president James Young said that PassPort's debut is an equal if not greater milestone, since it puts more custom RF/IF design in customers' hands.
PassPort library
PassPort will be integrated directly into the Advanced Design System (ADS) offered by Agilent Technologies Inc.'s EEsof Group. PassPort is based on a cell library with components such as resistors, inductors and transmission lines, which Intarsia calls icons in its "design palette." The variables of the thin-film-on-glass process are fully characterized within Agilent ADS, then elements can be combined in a point-and-click layout method. Before a design can be started, developers must specify the type of chip-scale packaging they wish to use, such as face-up or face-down orientation, and then specify values like capacitance. PassPort then parameterizes designs to the Intarsia fab, creates a scaled layout that can be simulated and generates a tape for mask fabrication.
Intarsia is also looking at other microwave and RF design environments, in addition to Agilent's ADS, as possible ports for the software suite. While MEMS-based RF component companies have talked of synthesizable amp and mixer design modules, Intarsia president Harry Van Wickle said that the only real challenge his company sees is from the low-temperature co-fired ceramics community, which is lagging in its ability to offer standardized design environments.
Intarsia was founded two years ago with financing from Dow Chemical and Flextronics Corp. Its first goal was to establish a 35,000-square-foot headquarters with a 9,500-square-foot Class 10 clean room, since experiments with large glass panels for thin films required ownership of a fab.
The company established a six-inch wafer line at the same site to develop prototypes in a more traditional environment, but being able to move quickly from wafer to glass panel demonstrated to investors the economic viability of using large panels for hybrid designs. Van Wickle said that some investors wondered if flat panels were ready for prime time, but the ability to get more than 27,000 dies from a 13.8 x 15.7-inch panel convinced even skeptics of the cost savings in moving from wafers to panels.
"We brought up the panel line first to prove we could do it, but we had to demonstrate the cost savings to really convince everyone," Van Wickle said.
Targeting RF and IF ? a field that includes emerging markets such as Bluetooth as well as the well-characterized PCS/3G phone markets centered on 2-MHz services ? Intarsia will integrate baseband blocks as far as line filtering or RF filtering, but has no plans to add baseband signal-processing engines directly to its modules.
The company has already adopted such chip-scale assembly technologies as ball attach and wafer-level test and will move to micro-via interconnect over the next few quarters. The advantage of integrating multiple passive and discrete RF devices in a single package is a significant, sometimes exponential, reduction in real estate for functions such as an LNA, voltage-controlled oscillator, filter or wireless LAN transceiver.
"That is why PassPort was so critical to moving to new integration levels," Young said. "If you're going to offer integration, you must deal with new design methods that allow iterative changes. Once you start integrating multiple passives, you can't keep tweaking the RF portion of a design in a rapidly-moving field like 3G handsets or Bluetooth receivers."
Brian H. |
