Dielectric Constant and Loss Tangent Characterization of Thin High-K Dielectrics Using Corner-to-Corner Plane Probing

Thin dielectrics with a high dielectric constant are very attractive for improving the decoupling performance of digital and mixed-signal systems. Accurate estimation of the dielectric constant and the loss tangent is important to calculate the impedance profile or the cavity resonances. Extracting the electrical properties of thin and high-K dielectrics is difficult using conventional methods such as microstrip or ring resonators with gaps, as the coupling through the gap becomes very small for an accurate measurement. We present a method to extract the frequency-dependent dielectric constant and loss tangent of such materials using rectangular power/ground planes. We have also developed a rapid plane solver for fast extraction of material properties from such measurements. We applied this rapid solver method to characterize a thin high-K material, but we believe it can be used for thick or low-K materials as well.