3D IPD on Thru Glass Via Substrate using panel Manufacturing Technology

As electronic products become smaller and thinner with increasing number of functions, the demand for high density and high integration becomes stronger. Glass has many properties that make it an ideal substrate for high integration substrate such as; ultra high resistivity, adjustable thermal expansion (CTE) high modulus, low dielectric constant, low dielectric loss and manufacturability with large panel sizes. Multi-bands with carrier aggregation, Wi-Fi/GPS coexistence, and LTE-U make RF front end more and more complicated. 3D IPD (integrated passive devices) on Glass substrate technology could be advantage solution include reducing power consumption and small form factor. This paper presents a demonstration of 3D RF front end filters using 3D solenoid inductors with through glass vias (TGV) and Cu-SiN-Cu MIM structure on Gen1 glass substrate (300mm × 400mm) panel format using color filter manufacturing line for flat panel display. For inductors, drastic performance (size and low resistance therefore high-quality factor) improvement have been demonstrated by technology evolutions from 3D solenoid using TGV with conformal Cu plating method, achieving low resistance of 3.1mohm per 70um diameter TGV on a 400um thick glass panel. This low-resistance TGV with 2.7mOhm/sq TGV connections on both sides of the glass substrate, record high inductor quality factor of 39 was obtained at 2.5GHz using five and half turn inductor of 7.9nH inductance, For capacitors, we have successfully integrated a Cu MIM (metal-insulator-metal) structure by using 15um thick Cu plates and dielectric, resulting in high capacitance density of 0.26nF/mm2 for RF application. By integrating TGV inductor-first and MIM capacitor-next, high-performance and high-density LC components are synthesized to perform as RF front end filters such as low-pass filters, diplexers, triplexers, and multiplexers. The 3D inductors, Cu MIM, LC resonators and filters were successfully integrated using glass panel manufacturing infrastructure for the first time. Process characterization and process control monitors were evaluated at the panel level to address high-volume and high-yield manufacturability of RF filters with the unprecedented filter performance in terms of insertion loss and out of band rejections in smaller form factor than any other technologies have achieved so far. Furthermore, the TGV filters were mounted on electrical evaluation boards as well as JEDEC standard testing boards to check any device-level, chip-level, and board-level reliabilities associated with glass or TGV materials as well as their interaction with Cu, SiN, polymer inter layer dielectric materials, and solder joints, showing no performance degradations during thermal cycling, drop shock, bending, or high-power testing situations.