Bijan Tehrani and Ryan Bahr have been named the recipients of the Best Student Paper Award at the 2017 IMAPS Symposium, held October 10-12 in Raleigh, N.C. Both Tehrani and Bahr are Ph.D. students in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE).

The title of their award-winning paper is “Inkjet and 3D Printing Technology for Fundamental Millimeter-Wave Wireless Packaging,” which they co-authored with Manos Tentzeris, their Ph.D. advisor and ECE’s Ken Byers Professor in Flexible Electronics. 

This work outlines the combination of additive inkjet and 3D printing fabrication technology for the realization of millimeter-wave wireless packages and multi-chip modules. Fully-printed ramp interconnects and “smart” encapsulants are demonstrated as an efficient alternative to traditional microelectronic wire bonding and epoxy molding techniques, respectively. These highly-reconfigurable packaging techniques have the potential to enable the scale development of application-specific wireless millimeter-wave systems for emerging 5G, IoT, and automotive radar applications.