Joel Lee Goodrich

A silicon optical bench approach to low cost high speed transceivers

In order to meet the increasing demand for bandwidth at reduced cost, new optical subassemblies must meet the critical demands of high data rate, 2.5-10 Gbit/s and a package amenable to high-volume and low cost production. Current approaches utilizing laser mounting to header assemblies with active laser alignment to outgoing optical fibers fail on both accounts. In response to this, the work described here details the development of a passively aligned silicon wafer board package capable of rates of 10 Gb/s and higher. Results show that through careful design and process control, single crystal silicon substrates containing passive alignment features (e.g., v-grooves, fiducial markings, etc.) can be reproducibly fabricated with sub-micron dimensional accuracies. The processing of the silicon wafer board and initial assembly of the components will be presented.

Manufacture of low-loss microwave circuits using HMIC technology

HMIC is a low cost, batch processed, surface mountable, microwave manufacturing technology that provides hybrid-type flexibility with monolithic-type passive component repeatability and precision. Recent results on power amplifier circuits have shown high power-added efficiencies with reduced size and is paving the way for low cost, high performance circuits for wireless communication markets.<<ETX>>

High power 6-18 GHz transfer switch using HMIC

A 6-18 GHz transfer switch is fabricated by a batch process technology, the HMIC (Heterolithic Microwave Integrated Circuit) process, and uses shunt-only silicon diodes. The switch emulates a commensurate-line bandpass filter and has insertion loss less than 2.0 dB with greater than 32 dB isolation and CW power handling in excess of 6 Watts.<<ETX>>

Chipscale mmW Switches

The biggest issues facing mmW components continue to be ones of fundamental high frequency performance and unit-to-unit repeatability. While solutions to these two basic issues are complex and multi-faceted, it is universally acknowledged that both the basic semiconductor performance at frequencies above 10 GHz and the unit variation are severely limited by packaging, die attach, and chip and wire assembly techniques. The purpose of this paper is to present a unique, fundamentally different approach to the packaging and integration of mmW components starting with the electrical input/output through final thermal heat sinking. This method is based upon a technology, HMIC, which utilizes standard semiconductor wafer scale processes to realize the final monolithic, chipscale, surface mountable element, in this case an mmW switch.

Novel thyristor-based microwave cross-point switch MMIC

A novel GaAs 16 /spl times/ 16 cross-point switch monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) is presented. The switch MMIC incorporates 256 GaAs microwave thyristor devices as switching elements. The thyristors are two-terminal devices with anodes connected to a common horizontal electrode and cathodes connected to a common vertical electrode. Bistable operation of the thyristors permits x-y addressing at the edge of the chip to turn on and off each thyristor. Applications include low-cost low-power high-bandwidth switching of signals for broad-band services. A detailed description of the thyristor device, MMIC structure and design, and simulation and experimental results are presented. Multilayer laminate ball-grid-array package design for the switch matrix will also be explained in detail.