Packaging effects on the figure of merit of a CMOS cascode low-noise amplifier: Flip-chip versus wire-bond

A comprehensive study is presented to compare the effects between flip-chip and wire-bond packages on a front-end cascode low-noise amplifier (LNA) in a 2.4 GHz CMOS wireless local area network (WLAN) receiver. To construct the package electrical models, specific modeling dies are designed to help extract the equivalent-circuit elements from measured S-parameters for chip-package interconnects. Furthermore, the ground-proximity effect on on-chip spiral inductors in a flip-chip package is presented for the first time in this modeling study. For practical applications, the established package models are used in a chip-package co-simulation to predict the degradation of figure of merit for the cascode LNA under packaged condition.