A paper authored by Dr. Brian Floyd, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at North Carolina State University, has been awarded one of the Pat Goldberg Best Paper Awards for 2011 by IBM Research.

The paper, titled "Organic Packages with Embedded Phased-Array Antennas for 60-GHz Wireless Chipsets", was among more than 110 papers in computer science, electrical engineering and mathematical sciences that were published in refereed conference proceedings and journals in 2011 that were submitted by IBM Research authors worldwide

Dr. Floyd says, "The 60-GHz application space is very exciting, where the large amount of available bandwidth enables high-speed wireless communications for applications like uncompressed wireless HD video streaming across your living room and multi-gigabit-per-second short-range file transfer between portable devices. For these markets to flourish, low-cost electronics are required, which includes a low cost integrated circuit and a low-cost antenna and package solution. In this work, we demonstrate for the first time a complete packaged 16-element phased-array chipset solution with embedded antennas, based on low-cost organic packaging technology."

You can read the full article on the IEEE Website.

Abstract

A multilayer organic package with embedded 60-GHz antennas and fully integrated with a 60-GHz phased array transmitter or receiver chip is demonstrated. The package includes sixteen phased-array antennas, an open cavity for housing the ?ip-chip attached RF chip, and interconnects operating at DC-66 GHz. The 28 mm x 28 mm ball grid array package is manufactured using printed circuit board processes and uses a combination of liquid-crystal polymer and glass-reinforced laminates, allowing excellent 60-GHz interconnect and antenna performance. The measured return loss and gain of each antenna from 56 to 66 GHz are -10 dB and -5 dBi, respectively. Finally, the packaged transmitter and receiver chipsets, each working with a heat sink, have demonstrated beam-steered, non-line-of-sight links with data rates up to 5.3 Gb/s using 16-quadrature amplitude modulation single-carrier and orthogonal frequency division multiplexing schemes.

IBM Press Release