Bond Wires as Interconnect Technology

Accurate modeling of the bonding wires is essential to successfully utilize semiconductor bare dies and achieve a large scale of integration of modern microwave front ends. WIPL-D Microwave provides a complete design environment where electromagnetic and circuit simulation can be efficiently applied to examine the influence of interconnects to the performance of an integrated system.

The limitations of the single wire bonds regarding the relatively narrow return loss bandwidth have been illustrated through the analysis of performance degradation of an amplifier. The improvement of the characteristics when double wire bonds are utilized are presented and the mechanism of the improvement explained.

The selected examples concentrate on the applications in the frequency range around 24 GHz. As the operating frequency goes higher, the effects of interconnects become more severe and some means of compensation of bond wire connections described in the literature must be utilized to keep the return loss at reasonable values or a different interconnect technology, such as flip chip of micro ball grid array (µBGA), has to be considered.

Section: Microwave Circuits

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