Through Silicon Via (TSV) technology is capable meeting effective, compact, high density, high integration, and high-performance requirements. In high-frequency applications, with the rapid development of 5G and millimeter-wave radar, the TSV interposer will become a competitive choice for radio frequency system-in-package (RF SIP) substrates. This paper presents a redundant TSV interconnect design for high resistivity Si interposers for millimeter-wave applications. To verify its feasibility, a set of test structures capable of working at millimeter waves are designed, which are composed of three pieces of CPW (coplanar waveguide) lines connected by single TSV, dual redundant TSV, and quad redundant TSV interconnects. First, HFSS software is used for modeling and simulation, then, a modified equivalent circuit model is established to analysis the effect of the redundant TSVs on the high-frequency transmission performance to solidify the HFSS based simulation. At the same time, a failure simulation was carried out and results prove that redundant TSV can still work normally at 44 GHz frequency when failure occurs. Using the developed TSV process, the sample is then fabricated and tested. Using L-2L de-embedding method to extract S-parameters of the TSV interconnection. The insertion loss of dual and quad redundant TSVs are 0.19 dB and 0.46 dB at 40 GHz, respectively.
Keywords: S-parameters extraction; equivalent circuit model; millimeter-wave; redundant TSV.