A Holistic Near-Field Over-the-Air Approach for the Design, Testing, and Evaluation of Chip-Package-PCB-AiP Modules

Traditional design approaches individually optimize the chip, package, printed circuit board, and antenna. Consequently, even with high success at each step, the overall end-to-end result will fall far short of an optimal solution for the overall module. This tutorial presents a holistic near-field, over-the-air (OTA) evaluation approach for chip-package-PCB-antenna modules based on a combined thermoreflectance imaging technique and thin-film coating using spin-crossover (SCO) materials, which is capable of pointing out the weaknesses in the design. The near-field sensing solutions are demonstrated through several practical applications of front-end-modules (FEMs) manufactured with advanced GaN and fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technologies co-designed with antenna-in-package (AiP) modules.