On-Wafer Capacitor Characterization Including Uncertainty Estimates Up to 1.0 THz

Published

July 19, 2024

Author(s)

Robert Jones, Jerome Cheron, Benjamin Jamroz, Dylan Williams, Ari Feldman, Peter Aaen, Christian Long, Nathan Orloff

Abstract

In this article we extract the capacitance of shunt and series metal-insulator-metal capacitors from on-wafer S-parameter measurements in the WR1.0 waveguide band. We verify consistency of the measured devices in two different state-of-the-art terahertz electronic processes and with two different designs of via-stitched grounded coplanar waveguide calibration kits. We investigate the measurement uncertainty of extracting a shunt capacitance in the presence of probe positioning uncertainty, calibration kit process variation, and random VNA errors. We find that these uncertainty sources result in a large prediction interval that is 30.2% of the capacitor's value (14.9 ±4.5 fF) at 900 GHz with the uncertainty from probe positioning as the largest contributor. This is the first time that an extensive uncertainty analysis has been performed on characterizing on-wafer devices at 1 THz. We quantify the precision of current calibration techniques and measurement equipment.

Citation

IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology

Volume

14

Issue

5

Pub Type

Journals

Download Paper

https://doi.org/10.1109/TTHZ.2024.3431190

Local Download

Keywords

calibration, coplanar waveguide (CPW), Indium Phosphide (InP), monolithic microwave integrated circuit (MMIC), multiline thru-reflect-line (mTRL), on-wafer, s-parameters, terahertz, vector network analyzer (VNA), WR1.0

Citation

Jones, R. , Cheron, J. , Jamroz, B. , Williams, D. , Feldman, A. , Aaen, P. , Long, C. and Orloff, N. (2024), On-Wafer Capacitor Characterization Including Uncertainty Estimates Up to 1.0 THz, IEEE Transactions on Terahertz Science and Technology, [online], https://doi.org/10.1109/TTHZ.2024.3431190, https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=957140 (Accessed October 9, 2025)