Antoon Marie Henrie Tombeur

A 3.5 mW 2.5 GHz diversity receiver and a 1.2 mW 3.6 GHz VCO in silicon-on-anything

A fully-integrated voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) and RF diversity receiver are fabricated in a bipolar IC technology called silicon-on-anything. With this silicon based technology it is possible to fabricate low-power transistors, as well as integrated inductors that have a quality factor of 225 at 1 GHz. The inductors in the VCO exhibit a maximum quality factor of 29 at 4 GHz, with a self-resonance frequency of 10.5 GHz.

A 48-860MHz digital cable tuner IC with integrated RF and IF selectivity

A single-chip digital cable tuner with an active splitter for cable data modems and set-top boxes is realized in a 0.5/spl mu/m, 30GHz BiCMOS technology. The IC employs a single down-conversion, low-IF architecture and can receive signals in the 48-860MHz range. Fully integrated selectivity is obtained in combination with a channel decoder. Power consumption is 1.5W with a 3.3V supply.

A 10 /spl mu/m thick RF-ID tag for chip-in-paper applications

In CIRCONFLEX technology, circuits fabricated on SOI wafers are transferred to a 10 /spl mu/m thick polyimide carrier. The highly flexible circuits remain defect free even after bending to radii of less than 1 mm, making them attractive for chip-in-paper applications. The effect of bending on the transistors characteristics is very small as demonstrated in this paper. A fully autonomous RF-ID tag demonstrator circuit with integrated antenna, fabricated in CIRCONFLEX technology is presented. The 3/spl times/3 mm/sup 2/ tag operates up to 1.5 cm from the base station, and continues to function even while bent to a radius of 0.7 mm.

Substrate Transfer: an Enabling Technology for System-in-Package Solutions

A simple and robust technology for the transfer of circuits, processed on normal silicon wafers, to alternative substrates is presented. Substrate transfer technology (STT) is a post-processing technology based on adhesive bonding using a UV curing adhesive. The authors demonstrate that STT can be used for the elimination of RF substrate losses, for double sided device processing and for the fabrication of flexible circuits and thermal sensors and actuators. The successful industrialization of the process demonstrates that STT is indeed a viable option for high-yield, low-cost mass production