A 10 MHz to 80 GHz BGA Transition from Chip to LTCC Interposer for Chip Scale Packages

Presented here are the design, fabrication, and measurement results of a low temperature cofired ceramic (LTCC) chip-to-interposer transition utilizing a flip-chip ball grid array (BGA) interconnect that provides excellent electrical performance up to and including 80 GHz. A test board fabricated in LTCC is used as the interposer substrate and another smaller LTCC part is used as a surrogate chip for demonstration purposes. The BGA chip-to-interposer transition is designed as a back-to-back pair of transitions with an assembly consisting of an LTCC interposer, an LTCC test chip, and a BGA interconnect constructed with 260 μm diameter polymer core solder balls. The LTCC material employed is DuPont™ GreenTape™ 9K7. Full-wave simulation results predict excellent electrical performance from 10 MHz to 80 GHz, with the chip-to-interposer BGA transition having less than 0.5 dB insertion loss at 60 GHz and less than 1 dB insertion loss up to 80 GHz. In an assembled package (back-to-back BGA transitions), the insertion loss was measured to be 1 dB per transition at 60 GHz and less than 2 dB per transition for all frequencies up to 80 GHz.