Laser direct writing of 40 GHz RF components on flexible substrates

• All-laser fabrication of Silver Co-Planar Waveguides on polymer substrates.
• High fabrication precision with surface roughness on the order of 10 nm.
• Beam shaping for the minimization of the heat affected zone.
• The resulting transmission lines have low power losses with a 40 GHz 3 dB bandwidth.

Flexible electronics have emerged as a very promising alternative of CMOS compatible electronics for a plethora of applications. Laser microfabrication techniques, such as selective laser patterning and sintering are compatible with flexible substrates and have demonstrated impressive results in the field of flexible electronic circuits and sensors. However, laser based manufacturing of radio frequency (RF) passive components or devices is still at an early stage. In this work we report on the all-laser fabrication of Silver Co-Planar Waveguides (CPWs) on polyethylene-naphthalate (PEN) substrates employing flat-top optics to achieve uniform laser fluence and thus high fabrication precision and reproducibility but also to mitigate the thermal effects of nanosecond laser pulses. The CPWs have been fabricated to match the impedance of 50 Ω ports of an Anritsu vector network analyzer operating from 40 MHz to 40 GHz. The all laser fabrication process consisted in the selective laser sintering of square dies on a Silver Nano Particle layer spin-coated on a PEN substrate followed by the selective laser patterning of the CPWs with a ns pulsed Nd:YAG laser source operating at 532 nm, according to the optimized parameters extracted from a previous studies of the authors. The CPWs have been characterized electrically at the 0.04–40 GHz regime and found to be excellent transmission lines with a 40 GHz 3 dB bandwidth, owing to the high electrical conductivity of Ag and the excellent dielectric properties of PEN. This novel process is a milestone towards the RF technology transfer to flexible electronics with low cost and specs comparable to the CMOS compatible equivalents.