Wideband electrical characterization and modeling of plastic packaging materials

Summary form only given. The paper presents the efforts performed in the areas of package modeling, and package and material (molding compound) characterization at RF/microwave frequencies. At high frequencies, material properties and properties of signal lines/interconnects are equally important. As such, the presented efforts dealt with material (molding compound) characterization of lead frames and bond wire. While the microwave characterization of the molding compounds performed in this study over a wideband of frequencies can be utilized in a variety of the plastic package structures, the objective of the model development was to develop an electrical model of 16 lead SOIC plastic packages, that gained lately a great popularity for packaging wireless RFICs. The models developed and used will be discussed along with experimental results. In this work, discussion of the techniques validation, the accuracy, the repeatability, and the variability will be conducted. For dielectric materials, such as plastic molding compounds used in RF/microwave packages, their electrical properties can be described by their relative dielectric constant and loss tangent. To measure these properties at microwave frequencies, the two most commonly used techniques are the resonant technique and the transmission line technique. In this paper, both techniques are used to characterize the dielectric properties of the plastic molding compounds. Two measurements techniques, the HP coaxial probe and the stripline resonator were used to characterize the material properties. Several issues related to these techniques will be described.