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To: Mats Ericsson who wrote (36)	5/26/2000 6:05:00 PM
From: Mats Ericsson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93

Environment targets RF thin-film integration Loring Wirbel FREMONT, CALIF. - Intarsia Corp. wants to move its RF thin-film integration effort to a new level of market acceptance. To that end, the company will disseminate a standard electronic design environment, PassPort, to external developers working in 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, spending two years perfecting the method it plans to move in such directions as micromachined device integration. The company is showing samples of the first standard-product fruit of its effort, a low-noise amp module, to PCS handset developers this spring. The 4 x 4 x 1.2-mm 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. 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. But executive vice president James Young said PassPort's debut is an equal if not greater milestone, since it puts more custom RF/IF design in customers' hands. 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 for such components 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, and 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 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 the only real challenge his company sees is from the low-temperature co-fired ceramics community, which lags 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. Proving the prototypes 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 panels demonstrated to investors the economic viability of using large panels for hybrid designs. Van Wickle said that some investors wondered whether flat panels were ready for prime time, but the ability to get more than 27,000 dice from a 13.8 x 15.7-inch panel convinced even skeptics of the cost savings in moving from wafers to panels. Targeting RF and IF, Intarsia will integrate baseband blocks as far as line filtering or RF filtering, but it 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 microvia 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 such functions 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." eetimes.com