Panatron Inc.

Monday, October 19, 2015

Antenna Measurement Techniques Association 2015 Student Day

What: AMTA (Antenna Measurement Techniques Association) 2015 Student Day

Where: Hyatt Regency Long Beach, 200 South Pine Ave., Long Beach, CA

When: Tuesday, October 13, 2015, 11:30 AM - 6:15 PM

Who: Undergraduate and graduate students with an interest in electromagnetics, antennas or anyone interested in networking with members of industry, government and academia.

AMTA Student Day 2015 in Long Beach, CA was a day to remember. We had approximately 10 students from our IEEE Foothill section schools Cal Poly Pomona and UC Riverside. There were also students from Cal State Northridge, UCIrvine and UCLA. AMTA provided 2 great speakers for the students. First was Brian Kent, Ph. D. from ARA (Applied Research Associates) who spoke on the Space Shuttle Return to Flight effort which focused primarily on RADAR systems to help track launch debris. The second speaker was Dr. Yahya Rahmat-Samii from UCLA and a well known expert in Antenna Design and Analysis. Along with the talks the students were given special presentations by four manufacturers in the Exhibit Hall and they participated in a hands-on antenna design competition where the students had to design. fabricate and test a helical antenna. The group that won the challenge was Cal State Northridge. Many thanks to Pat Pelland and his AMTA colleagues from NearField Systems in Torrance, CA for coordinating the AMTA student day.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

We Refurbish, Repair and Calibrate Magnum Microwave VCO

We Refurbish, Repair and Calibrate

Magnum Microwave VCO

We Refurbish, Repair and Calibrate Bell Efratom Rubidium Frequency Standard MRT-H-12 & MRT-H-101

We Refurbish, Repair and Calibrate

Bell Efratom Rubidium Frequency Standard

MRT-H-12 and MRT-H-101

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

We Repair and Calibrate: Menlo, Shason and TelGaAs Microwave Input Amplifier for MCL Transmitter

We Repair and Calibrate

Menlo, Shason and TelGaAs

Microwave Input Amplifier

for MCL Transmitter

We Repair and Calibrate Everts 7700PS & 500PS Plug-in Power Supplies

We Repair and Calibrate

Everts 7700PS & 500PS Plug-in Power Supplies

Thursday, July 16, 2015

MLA/SFV MTT Chapter Hosts MTT DML from Germany on July 15, 2015 at Caltech, Pasadena CA

MLA/SFV MTT Chapter

Hosts MTT DML from Germany

Caltech, Pasadena CA

July 15, 2015

Max Cherubin of Panatron, Inc. attended this event as the IEEE Foothill MTT & APS Chair.

"QFN-based Packaging Concepts for Millimeter Wave Transceivers"

Thomas Zwick (DML Term: 2013 - 2015)

Karlsruhe Institute of TechnologyKaiserstr. 12Karlsruhe Baden-Wuerttemberg 76128Germany
Professor

Abstract: During the last years the speed and also the level of integration of monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) increased drastically. Today's circuits are able to operate at frequencies up to the sub-millimeter-wave range (= 300 GHz) and combine highly sophisticated systems within one single chip (System on Chip, SoC). These chips have to be encapsulated in packages or modules to make their features available for the clients. Due to the fact that most of those systems require RF interconnections for external antennas or succeeding systems their packages have to fulfill very high requirements at machining and alignment as well as the used packaging materials. For frequencies beyond 100 GHz this normally involves high-quality but expensive and bulky waveguides and machined metal housings. RF modules out of metal offer a very high quality but are very expensive and result in a low level of integration. Due to the huge efforts for the creation of the packages, the price for a module is no longer limited by the inserted MMICs but by the packaging costs. To address a mass market for MMICs operating in the high millimeter-wave range such metal modules are not feasible and have to be replaced by cheaper packaging materials, which, however, come with a couple of additional problems. The plastic packaging materials are quite lossy and the RF interconnection of such a package is limited due to the lead and wire-bond inductances of approximately 1 nH/mm, which prohibit a frequency above 20 GHz. This presentation introduces the idea of a low-cost fully integrated surface-mountable millimeter-wave radar sensor. Different packaging topologies are compared with the potential of integrating the whole radar frontend together with the antennas into a single QFN (Quad-Flat-No-Lead) package. If no high frequency RF interconnect on/off the package is necessary the standard plastic packages come with another advantage, which is their usability within low-cost Surface Mount Technologies (SMTs). A highly complex system in package (SiP) can be picked and placed and finally soldered automatically onto the surface of a printed circuit board (PCB). This however makes it necessary to integrate the antenna together with the MMIC into a single package. In that case only DC and baseband signals have to be conducted through the package-to-board interconnections and thus the requirements for these interconnections are greatly relaxed. Different options how a fully integrated millimeter-wave system can be realized within a surface mountable package will be presented with measurements and different concepts for a low cost surface mountable 120GHz radar sensor in a QFN package will be compared.