Evaluation of silicon substrate losses at millimeter-wave frequencies
(2019) On-Wafer Users’ Forum 2019 at IEEE International Microwave Symposium – IMS’19 — Location: Boston, MA (USA) (2.June.2019)
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- Abstract
- Our research group has been working on CPW line measurements on several silicon substrates. Our main purpose has been the evaluation of RF losses related to the substrate. To that end, we usually use the effective resistivity as a figure of merit, describing the overall resistivity sensed by the CPW line, because conductive losses dominate in common silicon substrates. Our group has been working on innovative solutions to decrease the RF losses and enhance the linearity of silicon substrates. Two examples are the trap rich (TR) high resistivity (HR) silicon substrate, also called enhanced signal integrity (eSI) high resistivity silicon substrate, and a post-process local porous silicon integration, both compatible with CMOS process. The extraction of the losses related to such low-loss substrates are very challenging at millimeter-wave frequencies. The correct repartition of the total losses among the metallic and substrate losses are directly linked to the extracted imaginary part of the characteristic impedance (Im(Zc)) of the CPW lines. The precision required for an accurate extraction of the substrate performance is not met by any common Zc extraction methods at millimeterwave frequencies. This talk will mainly discuss about two aspects. It will first address the challenge of Zc extraction of CPW lines at millimeter-wave frequencies. Then, it will show an unexpected additional loss that can be modeled by a large effective dielectric loss. Although the effective value is larger than the dielectric loss of bulk silicon substrate by several orders of magnitude, the model fits accurately measurements up to 200 GHz.
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Citations
Nyssens, L., Rack, M., & Raskin, J.-P. (2019). Evaluation of silicon substrate losses at millimeter-wave frequencies. On-Wafer Users’ Forum 2019 at IEEE International Microwave Symposium – IMS’19, Boston, MA (USA). https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/228692