On the yield of millimeter-wave bond-wire antennas in high-volume production

For the development of highly integrated millimeterwave front-end modules, a low-cost and high-performance antenna technology is of paramount importance. Here, standard wire-bond technology is a very attractive candidate due to its widespread availability, computationally efficient modeling options, and promising performance as an antenna. A concern often stated with respect to antennas in this technology, however, is its expected low yield in high volume production. This concern is addressed in this paper by means of a dedicated, computationally efficient antenna model in conjunction with standard deviations of state-of-the-art wire-bonders. The results indicate a possible yield of larger than 99.9 % for operating frequencies of up to 250 GHz.