High Frequency Application, a real challenge for organic packages?

Organic packages for High Frequencies Applications are becoming a real need to meet cost/performance targets for Telecom applications and in growing sectors driven by higher frequency requirements. A study of foundamental properties required to an organic package to be implemented for these range of applications is presented. Some past experiences have demonstrated that with current designs and materials, performance in the 20GHz range are possible while applications at lower frequencies are definitively available. This paper will present how the current available technologies coupled with design techniques can be used to satisfy this kind of packaging requirements. High wireability packages engineered to address the ever increasing interconnection density for the digital world can be effectively used to address many of the critical analogue/high frequency requirements. Introduction Organic chip carriers packages are relatively new for high frequency applications. They are perceived as “being a good candidate” for low cost High Speed analog/digital applications, but still to be proved in terms of real performance capability. As high frequency is becoming a pervasive element in many new application spaces and commodity products, the marketable price to the final customer starts to apply pressure to system designer in selecting cost/performance effective solutions. For this reason organic packages are been considered for a new span of product development organizations historically less sensible to packaging cost and more used to higher cost substrate materials. The objective now becomes the understanding of the behaviour of organic composite materials commonly used to build low speed digital applications in this new environment. A precise scrutiny of the materials properties as well of the available design techniques should lead to answer the basic questions on “If” and “How” it is possible to use these materials in applications working at higher frequencies. The application space Within the wide range of products that can benefit of such new development for organic carriers there are the local wireless links/lans Semiconductor Packaging Symposium