ICPA fed with packaging interconnect components for single-chip wireless transceivers

An integrated-circuit package antenna (ICPA) offers an elegant antenna solution for single-chip wireless transceivers. This article presents such an ICPA with an emphasis on its feeding technique from the carried single-chip wireless transceiver. This ICPA, in a thin 48-ball cavity-down ceramic-ball grid-array (CBGA) integrated-circuit package format, is designed for applications at 5.8 GHz using the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) modeling method. It is shown that the ICPA with a footprint of 17 × 17 mm2 achieves impedance bandwidth of 1.4%, radiation efficiency of 88%, and gain of 6.4 dBi at the designed frequency. The ICPA is fed by a bond wire, a signal trace, and a via through an aperture on the ICPA ground plane. The effects of these feeding components on the ICPA's performance are investigated. It is found that they mainly affect the impedance characteristics, while the radiation properties of the ICPA remain unchanged. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE, 2006.