Lumped Element MIM Capacitor Model for Si-RFICs

Daniel Gruner1#, Zihui Zhang1, Viswanathan Subramanian1, Falk Korndoerfer2, Georg Boeck1
1

Microwave Engineering Lab, Berlin University of Technology, 10587 Berlin, Germany 2 IHP GmbH, Im Technologiepark 25, 15236 Frankfurt (Oder), Germany
#

daniel.gruner@tu-berlin.de
II. TEST STRUCTURES A 0.25 m SiGe BiCMOS technology with five levels of Aluminium (Al) interconnects is used to implement various MIM capacitors. The capacitors are realized between the second (Metal 2) and the third metal level (Metal 3) using an extra metallic layer (Metal C) in order to achieve high capacitance values. The thickness of silicon nitride insulator between the MIM capacitor plates is about 58 nm (Fig.1) with r = 7.3, whereas the thickness of the silicon bulk is about 370 m. Fig. 2 shows a layout example of a 4.9 pF capacitor. The other analyzed structures differ just in the size of the capacitor. All layouts are made based on the same principle. Starting on the left hand side, there are input pads (80 m 80 m) in GSG arrangement with 150 m pitch, 16 m microstrip line with 100 m length, MIM capacitor, once again 100 m microstrip line and output pads with the same configuration as input pads. The ground beneath the capacitor (Metal 1) is suspended in order to minimize the parasitic coupling capacitors.

Abstract This work describes a lumped element based MIM capacitor model for the frequency range up to 110 GHz. Several MIM capacitors with different areas have been fabricated in a five metal layer 0.25 m SiGe HBT technology. All structures have been analyzed in a 2.5 D EM simulation environment and the simulated results are compared to measurements. A lumped element model valid up to 110 GHz has been developed based on curve fitting techniques. Good agreements with measurements have been achieved up to 110 GHz. Finally, the extracted model parameters suitable for the entire frequency range are tabulated. Index Terms MIM devices, integrated circuit modeling, EM simulation, de-embedding, SiGe HBT.

I. INTRODUCTION Metal-Insulator-Metal (MIM) capacitors are very important passive components in radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) and monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs), respectively. Because of their extensive use in DC blocks, matching sections, on-chip filtering, etc. it is important to predict the performance of such capacitors in terms of their parasitic elements, particularly at very high frequencies. This work is a part of the development of a complete passive component library for the 180/220 GHz fT /fMAX SiGe HBT technology from IHP, Frankfurt (Oder) Germany. Many authors have worked on getting an approximate model for such MIM capacitors [1]-[4]. They have included lumped elements [1]-[2] and distributed elements [3] to their models and applied curve fitting methods [4] to measurements. In an earlier paper of the authors [5] an electromagnetic analysis and experimental verification of integrated microstrip transmission lines on silicon substrate have been performed up to 90 GHz. Several microstrip lines with different widths and lengths have been analyzed on a five metal layer silicon substrate together with a commercial SiGe HBT process. In this work, a linecapacitor-line model has been developed based on electromagnetic analysis and experimental characterization of integrated capacitor test structures. The results of the EM simulations and measurements have been compared and a lumped model has been extracted from the measured results. The organization of this paper is as follows. Section II describes the designed structures. The comparison of EM simulations with measurements is presented in section III showing a good agreement up to 110 GHz. Section IV introduces the applied de-embedding technique as shown in [5] and presents the de-embedded MIM capacitor model.

Metal 5 Metal 4 Metal 3 Metal C Nitride Metal 2 Metal 1 SiO 2 Epi layer Si bulk

Fig. 1.

MIM capacitor within the stacked metallic layers.

Fig. 2.

Layout example of a 4.9 pF MIM capacitor.

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In general, MIM capacitance values increase proportional to their areas. For the given MIM layer permittivity of r = 7.3, the theoretical value of capacitance density is about 1 fF/m2. In our current work, the analyzed structures include quadratic plate areas between 250 m2 and 4900 m2 for capacitance values from 250 fF to 4.9 pF. To maintain a uniform parasitic ground capacitance, Metal 1 is cut at 12 m from the edges of the rectangular capacitor plates. For the microstrip feeding line, a length of 100 m has been chosen, since this line has been already measured, modelled and de-embedded in [5]. III. EM SIMULATION AND MEASUREMENTS A. EM Analysis Due to the planar arrangement, the planar EM solver SONNET [6] based on method of moments (MoM) has been used. In [5] the importance of thick metal characterization for the metallic layers and their influence on the simulation accuracy is presented. Considering these aspects the MIM capacitor EM simulation of this work is based on a similar approach. Fig. 3 shows the SONNET 3D visualization of a MIM capacitor with thick metal option for all the metallic layers.

S11 Simulation S11 Measurement

Frequency Range: 10 to 110 GHz

Fig. 4 (a). Reflection coefficients for measurement (triangle) and 2.5D simulation (rectangle) of a 250 fF capacitor.

S21 Simulation S21 Measurement

Frequency Range: 10 to 110 GHz

Fig. 4 (b). Transmission coefficients for measurement (triangle) and 2.5D simulation (rectangle) of a 250 fF capacitor.
20

Error Magnitude [%]

15

Fig. 3. 3D visualization of a MIM capacitor from SONNET EM simulation.

10

Error Magnitude of S21 Error Magnitude of S11

B. Measurements Several MIM capacitor structures have been characterized with an Agilent 8510XF 110 GHz vector network analyzer through on-wafer probing in GSG configuration. A shortopen-load-through calibration technique (SOLT) has been applied to calibrate the measurement setup over the complete frequency range. Representative for all MIM capacitors results we will only present the results of a 250 fF MIM capacitor. Fig. 4 shows the comparison of the reflection (a) and transmission (b) coefficients of EM simulations (rectangle) and measurements (triangle) up to 110 GHz. To evaluate the accuracy of the simulations, the frequency dependent deviation between measured and simulated magnitude values in percentage has been calculated. The results are shown in Fig. 4 (c).

0 0 20 40 60 80 100 120

Frequency [GHz]
Fig. 4 (c). Magnitude of the error vector of S11 (rectangle) and S21 (triangle) for a 250 fF capacitor.

It can be seen that the EM simulated data is close to the measured values at lower frequencies. The agreement of simulations and measurements degrades at higher frequencies due to the increasing parasitic effects, which cannot be represented correctly with EM simulation. The maximum error magnitude is 20 % at 100 GHz. Hence a proper modeling of passive structures in the RFIC design is absolutely necessary at such high frequencies.

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IV. DE-EMBEDDED MODEL The applied de-embedding technique already has been introduced in [5]. Using this procedure the S-parameters of the MIM capacitor can be determined from measurement results. The calculated S-parameters of the MIM capacitor are the base for the development of a lumped element MIM capacitor model. As a first step, a microstrip line of 200 m length with GSG pad arrangements on each side has been measured. Due to the symmetry of this structure (pad-200 m microstrip line-pad), the A-parameter matrix of each of both pad-100 m microstrip line structures can be de-embedded from the cascaded Aparameter matrix as shown in the Fig. 5 (a) and equation (1).
Pads + Line
G

MIM Capacitor

Line + Pads
G

Lvia,t Rvia,t
S

C
Ct

Rvia,b Lvia,b
S

Cb
G

Fig. 6. De-embedding plane and equivalent electrical circuit of MIM capacitors.

Figure 7 (a)-(c) show the S-parameter comparison between measurements and the developed lumped element model for a 250 fF capacitor.

[P] [P]=[T200]

(1)

S11 Measurement S11 Model

[P]
(a)

[P]

[P] [C] [P]=[Tcap]

(2)

Frequency Range: 10 to 110 GHz

Fig. 7 (a). Reflection coefficients for measurement (rectangle) and the model (triangle) of a 250 fF capacitor.

[P]
(b)

[C]

[P]

Fig. 5. De-embedding principle (a) shorted through line with 200 m length (b) 100 m line + MIM capacitor + 100 m Line.

S21 Measurement S21 Model

The A-parameter matrices of the MIM capacitors are calculated by extracting the pads and feeding lines as displayed in Fig. 5 (b) and equation (2). Finally, the Sparameters of the MIM capacitors can be obtained from the evaluated A-parameter matrices. A MIM capacitor can be modeled by characterizing all its discontinuities and coupling mechanisms using lumped elements. Fig. 6 shows a simple equivalent circuit based on lumped elements, whose values are determined from measurements by curve fitting using ADS from Agilent. C is the main element of the MIM capacitor. Lvia,t and Lvia,b are the parasitic inductances existing in electrodes and via connections. Rvia,t and Rvia,b model the parasitic losses of the vias and capacitor plates. Cb and Ct represent the capacitance of the top and bottom MIM capacitor plate to ground. All elements are extracted by minimizing the squared error vector magnitude of all S-parameter between measured and modeled data.

Frequency Range:10 to 110 GHz

Fig. 7 (b). Transmission coefficients for measurement (rectangle) and the model (triangle) of a 250 fF capacitor.

The evaluation of modeling accuracy is based on the error calculation between measured and modeled S-parameter. From 10 to 90 GHz the maximum error magnitudes of S11 and S21 are nearly zero, for higher frequencies the error magnitudes are less than 8 %. These facts justify the development of a lumped element MIM capacitor model as suggested above.

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Table I shows the extracted values of the lumped elements for the proposed equivalent circuit of the MIM capacitor. TABLE I DE-EMBEDDED ELEMENT VALUES OF THE EQUIVALENT CIRCUIT
Structure C 250 fF 500 fF 1000 fF 1500 fF 2000 fF 2500 fF 4900 fF Rvia,t 1.8 1.4 1.2 1.4 1.9 1.6 1.4 Element values from Measurement Rvia,b Lvia,t Lvia,b Ct Cb 1.5 12 pH 7 pH 7 fF 15 fF 1.7 10 pH 8 pH 8 fF 17 fF 2.5 11 pH 9 pH 9 fF 18 fF 1.8 15 pH 10 pH 9 fF 25 fF 1.3 18 pH 15 pH 9 fF 28 fF 2.0 19 pH 16 pH 10 fF 33 fF 1.7 31 pH 33 pH 11 fF 31 fF

REFERENCES
[1] H. D. Ky, S. Meszaros, M. Cuhaci and B. Syrett, Physical lumped modeling of thin-film MIM capacitors, in Proc. 20th European Microwave conf., Budapest, Hungary, pp. 1270-1274, Sept. 1990. [2] J. D. Arnould, P. H. Bench, S. Cremer, J. Torres and A. Farcy, RF MIM Capacitors Using Si3N4 Dielectric in Standard Industrial BiCMOS Technology, IEEE Int. Symposium vol. 1, pp. 27- 30, May 2004. [3] J. P. Mondal, An experimental verification of a simple distributed model of MIM capacitors for MMIC applications, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech., vol. MTT-35, pp. 403408, April 1987. [4] G. Gerhard and S. Koch, MIM shunt-capacitor model using black boxes of EM-simulated critical parts, IEEE Trans. MTT, vol. 49, no. 3, pp. 559-562, Mar. 2001. [5] V. Subramanian, Z. Zhang, D. Gruner, F. Korndoerfer, G. Boeck, Analysis and Characterization of Microstrip Structures up to 90 GHz in SiGe BiCMOS, 37th European Microwave Conf., October 2007. [6] SONNET Software Inc. (1983) [Online]. Available: http://www.sonnetsoftware. [7] P. Lombard, J. D. Arnould, O. Exshaw, H. Eusebe, P. Benech, A. Farcy, and J. Torres, MIM capacitors model determination and analysis of parameter influence, IEEE ISIE, June 2005. [8] Th. Zwick, Y. Tretiakov, D. Goren, On-Chip SiGe Transmission Line Measurements and Model Verification up to 110 GHz, IEEE Microwave and Wireless components letters, vol. 15, pp. 65-67, Feb. 2005. [9] Jyoti P. Mondal, Tzu-Hung-Chen, Propagation Constant Determination in Microwave Fixture De-embedding Procedure, IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory Tech, vol. 36, pp. 706-714, April 1998. [10] Alain M. Mangan, Sorin P. Voinigescu, Ming-Ta Yang and Mihai Tazlauanu, De-Embedding Transmission Line Measurements for Accurate Modeling of IC Designs, IEEE Trans. on Electron Devices, vol. 53, pp. 235-241, Feb. 2006. [11] Thomas-Michael Winkel, Lohit Sagar Dutta, Hartmut Grabinski, An Accurate Determination of the Characteristic Impedance of Lossy lines on Chips Based on High Frequency S-Parameter Measurements, IEEE Mutli-Chip Module Conference, pp. 190195, February 1996.

From the table above we can draw some important conclusions regarding the developed lumped element model: The increasing value of inductances (Lvia,t and Lvia,b) and metal to ground capacitors (Cb and Ct) are due to the increasing metallic areas of the MIM capacitor plates. These elements are in turn proportional to the nominal value of the MIM capacitor. Because of the fact, that the two capacitor plates do not use the same metal layer, the feeding elements and ground capacitors connected to the top and bottom plate differ slightly. This can be clearly seen from Table I. V. CONCLUSION Several MIM capacitors have been fabricated in a 0.25 m BiCMOS standard technology. The characterization and modeling of these integrated capacitor structures is presented. Good agreements of measured data, EM simulation and models have been achieved from 10 GHz to 110 GHz for capacitance values between 250 fF and 4.9 pF. This work can be seen as part of passive component library containing all types of lumped elements, interconnects and parasitic structures on silicon substrate with multi layer stack. Together with the active models it should be the design starting point for SiGe HBT based circuits up to and beyond 110 GHz [5]. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The authors would like to thank their IHP colleagues for the fruitful collaboration.

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