A Packaged 135GHz 22nm FD-SOI Transmitter on an LTCC Carrier

We present a packaged 135GHz broadband direct conversion transmitter IC integrated with a series-fed patch antenna on a high-performance Kyocera ceramic interposer GL771 ( epsilon(r) = 5.2 , delta = 0.003) . The IC, designed in GlobalFoundries (GF) 22nm SOI CMOS, is flip-chip bonded to the interposer using 50 mu m diameter copper pillars. The IC-package interface has similar to 0.9 dB measured loss. The measured antenna has 11dB gain, 12 degrees E-plane 3-dB beam-width, and 6-GHz 3-dB bandwidth. The integrated transmitter module has measured 13dBm EIRP and 6GHz 3-dB modulation bandwidth, the latter limited by the antenna. Measurements of the transmitter's modulation constellations shows that it can support 16Gbps using 16QAM and 15Gbps using 64-QAM.