Comparing flip-chip and wire-bond package effects on a receiver low-noise amplifier

A comprehensive study based on chip-package co-modeling compares the effects between flip-chip ball-grid-array (FC-BGA) and wire-bond quad-flat-nonlead (WB-QFN) packages on a front-end cascode low-noise amplifier (LNA) in a 2.45 GHz CMOS wireless local area network (WLAN) receiver. In practical applications, the established package models are used to predict the degradation of figure of merit (FOM) for the cascode LNA under packaged condition. Chip-package co-modeling results achieve good agreement with measurements, and thus can persuasively account for the complete effects caused by the two different packages on the cascode LNA.