Success Story: University Of Colorado Students Learned Microwave Office Software With Ease

The Design Challenge
Students in Dr. Popovic's class were tasked with choosing a monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC) that supported their respective thesis research projects. These projects are funded by an impressive list of government agencies and private industries ranging from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), to the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Nuvotronics, BAE Systems, Sandia Laboratories, National Semiconductor, and the Coleman Institute.

All of the MMICs were designed using Microwave Office software, and their manufacturability was verifi ed using ICED, a no-cost plug-in feature in Microwave Office 2008. The students then used AWR's process design kit (PDK) for TriQuint's TQPED 0.5-µm E/D pseudomorphic high electron mobility transistor (pHEMT) process, which helped them quickly and easily transfer their designs to fabrication. TriQuint provided the University of Colorado with a quarter of their gallium arsenide (GaAs) wafer, and the devices were fabricated in roughly a one month turn-around timeframe. The students then characterized their fabricated devices using a probe station, and in some cases packaged them for full testing.