Design and Experimental Evaluation of 60 GHz Self-compensating Bond-wire Interconnect

In this paper, a bond-wire impedance compensation technique based on using bond-wires as a half-wavelength long transmission line is designed, implemented and experimentally verified for a 60 GHz interconnection between an integrated circuit (IC) and printed circuit board (PCB). For this purpose, electromagnetic simulations (EM) of the entire interconnection i.e. the IC, the bond-wire and the PCB are performed and subsequently characterized experimentally. The comparison of the measurements with the simulations shows a good agreement. It is found that although the bond-wires are about 2.4mm long, the measured insertion loss is better than 0.66 dB at 60 GHz and a -10 dB reflection bandwidth from 57.5 GHz to 64 GHz can be achieved. Furthermore a technique is proposed to ease the implementation of such a long interconnection and to help in maintaining the desired parallelism between the bond-wires.