Internship Antenna Design and Simulations for Antenna-in-Package Applications

Internship Antenna Design and Simulations for Antenna-in-Package Applications

CITC is a research center that develops new chip integration (also called ‘advanced packaging’ or ‘heterogeneous integration’) technologies. The center is located in Nijmegen at the Novio Tech Campus and is a cooperation between universities/research institutes and companies. Industrial companies work together with TNO and TU Delft to develop new and innovative chip integration technologies.

Are you a highly motivated and enthusiastic student in Electrical engineering or Applied physics? Are you willing to work in the field of semiconductor packaging in a highly dynamic environment on the crossroad of academia and industry? Are you interested in developing novel semiconductor packaging concepts integrating high-performance RF elements such as antennas and waveguides? If YES, then contact us at CITC as we are looking for you!

Profile

You are a highly motivated and enthusiastic student from electrical engineering or applied physics with an affinity for electromagnetic simulations. You have good communication skills in English and you are independent, but also a team player. You are interested in performing electromagnetic simulations of innovative RF and antenna systems and in learning about manufacturing technologies for electronics packaging.

Location: CITC, Novio Tech Campus, Nijmegen
Position: internship/graduation assignment (3-9 months)

Background of the assignment

The operational frequency of many devices is shifting to the mm-Wave domain for many different applications, e.g. in the communication domain with the widespread adoption of 5G, in the automotive domain with car radar operating at 77 GHz. For many of these applications Antenna-in-Package solutions are adopted and radiating elements are integrated directly onto the IC package. The integration of RF elements into the package poses many technical challenges and calls for innovative solutions to obtain high-efficiency and high-performance antenna systems and low-losses interconnects, among others.

Project objective

At CITC, we have a program focusing on developing packaging technologies for chips operating in the mm-Wave domain, i.e. for communication application for 5G and for automotive radar. We investigate new emerging technologies for the manufacturing of packages and we investigate novel integration concepts for RF systems.

In this internship you will perform electromagnetic simulations to find out innovative integration strategies for high performance mm-Wave devices. Currently, we have many different topics that can be explored and the project will be defined in agreement with the candidate interests and the topics that will be available at the start date. Possible topics are:

• Design and testing of 3D printed antenna structure on substrates with engineered permittivity
• Investigation of plastic-based artificial dielectric layers for improved efficiency of microstrip antennas
• Investigation of ground-plane meshing for antenna-array performance improvement

Depending on the chosen topic, the goal will be to design and simulate the RF package components and compare the performance with those of the state-of-the art solutions. Depending on the internship duration, it is possible to combine the simulation task with the fabrication and testing of the designed concepts. During your internship you will be a member of the CITC RF Chip Packaging program team.

Your tasks

• Knowledge acquisition through literature survey and discussion with other team members
• Analysis and design activities using commercial software’s for electromagnetic simulation like HFSS, CST and using own Matlab scripts.
• Analysis of the simulation results and presentation thereof
• Documenting results in a technical report and taking part in technical meetings, internal seminars/colloquia

Knowledge of these software packages and experience with programming in Matlab, Python or similar are considered an asset.

Contact person
If you are interested please contact Francesca Chiappini, Program Manager RF Chip Packaging.