Development of a multilayer organic packaging technique for a fully embedded T/R module

This paper presents an organic Liquid Crystal Polymer (LCP) based system-on-package (SoP) module for an X- band SiGe transmit/receive module with integrated low noise amplifier, duplexer switch and 3-bit phase shifter. An embedded die concept is implemented to achieve reduced form factor, planar profile and near-hermetic packaging. The die is flip- chipped and fully embedded into an all LCP platform through construction of a cavity to host the chip. Performance of the die is measured before and after packaging for comparison of the receiver gain, noise figure and phase shifter states. Results show 0.2 dB of loss attributed to the embedding of the chip while 0.4 dB of loss is attributed to the flip-chip interface. The package introduces only 0.3 dB of added noise figure and minimal distortion to the phase shifter.