Novel Additively Manufactured Packaging Approaches for 5G/mm-Wave Wireless Modules

Additive packaging has garnered an increasing amount of interest due to its promising industrial scalability, and its materials and topological patterning versatility. The effort described in this paper benchmarks the performance of such a packaging approach relative to its commercial counterpart for the integration of devices operating in the mm-wave 5G bands. The approach first demonstrates the fully-inkjet-printed integration of a tunnel diode-a component empowering a plethora of emerging applications in these frequency bands-before comparing it to its pre-packaged counterpart. In an effort to enable an accurate and quantifiable comparison, the measured properties of the two integrated diodes were de-embedded using a TRL extraction method before their lumped element models were determined and compared. The comparison demonstrates a general and often significant reduction in all the packaging parasitics, up to 53%, using the additive approach. This result adds upon the growing evidence supporting the superior electrical performance of additive packaging for the integration of mm-wave dies and strengthens the appeal for the development of ultra-compact and ultra-high-performance fully-additively-manufactured mm-wave Systems in Package (SiP).