A Low-cost Surface-mountable Transition for High-speed Digital and Wideband Millimeter-wave Packaging Applications

This paper presents a low-cost and high-performance surface-mountable (SM) leadless transition structure for high-speed digital and wideband millimeter-wave packaging applications over a wide frequency range from DC up to the Ka band. This paper outlines the key issues involved in designing and optimizing the entire vertical transition path, starting from the top surface of a leadless surface mount package and ending at the print circuit board (PCB). The packages were manufactured in a standard, multilayer high-temperature co-fired ceramic (HTCC) process. The packages included 12 radio frequency (RF) input/output connections were sealed by the parallel seam welding sealing process, which ensured the good hermeticity, low cost and mass productivity. The ceramic packages were mounted on a PCB using standard surface-mount assembly process. The RF performance of the proposed transition structure was validated with on-wafer scattering parameter measurements. The measured results exhibit return and insertion loss values better than 15dB and 0.5dB, respectively, up to 40GHz. Moreover, the package shows the high thermal and mechanical reliability.