Impact of process tolerances on the performance of bond wire antennas at RF/microwave frequencies

Due to the multitude of advantages bond wire antennas have over conventional planar antennas (especially on-chip planar antennas), they have received much research attention within the last Jour years. The Jocus oj the contributions made so Jar has been on exploiting different configurations oj single- element and array bond wire antennas Jor short-range applications at RF/microwave jrequencies. However, the effects of process tolerances of bond wires on the radiation characteristics of bond wire antennas have not been studied in published literature. Therefore in this paper; we investigate the impact of up to 20% fluctuations in the parameters of bond wires on the performance of 42 GHz and 60 GHz bond wire antennas. Our results reveal that the length and radius of bond wires are the most and least sensitive parameters, respectively. Furthermore, the severity of the impact of process tolerances depends on the impedance bandwidth of the original antenna, before consideri ng the tolerances. For example, a 10% change in the length of a bond wire causes the resonance frequency of a 42 GHz antenna to be shifted out of the specified 3GHz bandwidth (40.5 GHz-43.5 GHz) required for point-to-point communication. However, although a 10% change in length of a bond wire yields a 2.5 GHz shift in the resonance frequency of a 60 GHz bond wire antenna, it doesn't completely detune the antenna because of the original 6 GHz bandwidth available, prior to the fluctuation. Therefore, to prevent the impact of process tolerances from severely degrading the performance bond wire antennas, these antennas should be designed to have larger bandwidths than specified. For experimental verification, a bond wire antenna was designed, jabricated and measured. Very good correlation was obtained between measurement and simulation.