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In this paper, a new approach is presented for determining the substrate parameters of an arbitrary doping profile. It is general, technology independent, nonintrusive, and relies on simple direct-current measurements. A single measurement is required for uniform substrates, whereas two more measurements are needed for each additional layer in the multilayer case. Two different kernels are introduced for substrate resistance computation. One features a closed-form analytical solution of the Laplace equations defining the problem under study. The other relies on a geometric formulation of the current streamlines in order to compute the substrate resistance. Both simulations and measurements are exploited in order to show the validity of the proposed scheme. For measurements, data from literature are utilized and also data from a fabricated test chip. The results demonstrate that the proposed method succeeds in computing the substrate parameters fast and with high accuracy. In uniform substrates, the error falls to zero, whereas, in epitaxial substrates, the average error is kept bellow 4%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A method for calculating capacitive and resistive coupling is developed in this work, and its implementation in commonly encountered practical cases is presented. The method is based on the geometry of the coupling mechanism, and the derived model is therefore, in general, scalable and technology independent. The constraints of any related problem can easily be incorporated into this method, whereas pure 3-D effects, such as capacitive coupling, are fast and accurately computed. The proposed method is validated using measurements from a test chip in the UMC 0.18-µm CMOS lightly doped process, simulation data obtained by two commercial simulators, and theoretical results. The accuracy of the method is shown to be within 2%-10%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]