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MEDIA ALERT
Unique Program Lets Graduate-Level Students Design, Fabricate, and Test Microwave Monolithic Integrated Circuits (MMICs)
Date:
February 23, 2009
Who:
AWR, TriQuint Semiconductor and University of Colorado
Story:
Most graduate-level engineering students studying microwave theory are fortunate to virtually design and fabricate hybrid microwave circuits, but few get the chance to not only design MMICs but transfer their designs to a foundry, obtain working devices, and evaluate their actual performance against simulated results as well. Thanks to an innovative program between the University of Colorado at Boulder, AWR, and TriQuint Semiconductor, this has become a reality for students in the computer-aided active microwave circuit design course taught by Prof. Zoya Popovic.
Prof. Popovic is the Hudson Moore Jr. chairperson in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She tasked students to design a MMIC in support of their respective thesis research projects, which are funded by government agencies and private industry.
Each MMIC was designed using AWR's Microwave Office® software and verified for manufacturability using the ICED feature in Microwave Office 2008. AWR's process design kit (PDK) for TriQuint's TQPED 0.5-µm E/D pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) process was then employed to easily transfer the design to fabrication. TriQuint provided the University of Colorado with one quarter of a gallium arsenide (GaAs) wafer, and the devices were fabricated in roughly a month's time. The students then characterized them with a probe station, and in some cases packaged them for full testing.
Dr. Popovic now looks to the next course -- and a new and larger crop of 23 graduate students.
Read the full University of Colorado Success Story >>
