Journal of the Korean Physical Society, Vol. 41, No. 6, December 2002, pp.

922926
RF Modeling of an MOS Varactor and MIM Capacitor in 0.18-m
CMOS Technology
Seong-Sik Song, Jeonghu Han, Minkyu Je, Kwangseok Han and Hyungcheol Shin

Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science,

Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Daejeon 305-701
(Received 23 April 2002)
In this paper, RF models for an MOS varactor and an MIM capacitor fabricated in 0.18-m CMOS
technology were developed in the GHz frequency range. In particular, the MOS varactor and the
MIM capacitor were modeled in order to predict the behaviors of those with various bias conditions
and device dimensions at high frequency, respectively. As a result, the RF models produced results
that were in very good agreement with measurements. These models will be very valuable to the
RF circuit designers because they can accurately describe the characteristics of MOS varactors and
MIM capacitors.
PACS numbers: 85.30.De
Keywords: RF modeling, MOS varactor, MIM capacitor, CMOS technology
I. INTRODUCTION
As complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor
(CMOS) technology continues to benet from both
scaling and the enormous momentum of the digital
market, it is considered as an attractive candidate for
many high-speed and radio frequency integrated circuits
(RFIC) [1]. Of the RFIC components fabricated in
CMOS technology, capacitors play one of the most
important roles. Varactors can be used in the LC
tank of a voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) [2, 3]
to produce dierent VCO oscillation frequencies, and
capacitors are used extensively in many applications
such as analog lters, switched capacitor circuits,
data-converters, and radio frequency (RF) circuits.
Particularly metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) varac-
tors and metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors, due
to their high quality, are very important RF passive
components. Since the characteristics of MOS varactors
and MIM capacitors change with operating frequency,
device geometry and bias conditions, RF models that
can accurately describe such variations in behaviors,
in particular, the variation with device geometry, are
urgently needed for RF circuit design. To attain this
aim, we developed RF models for MOS varactors and
MIM capacitors based on the physical structures of the
devices.
II. MODELING OF THE MOS VARACTOR

E-mail: gatbachi@eeinfo.kaist.ac.kr; Fax: +82-42-869-8590

1. RF Modeling
MOS varactors with dierent device geometries were
fabricated on a 1 cm substrate in a standard 0.18-m
CMOS process. The MOS varactors were designed as a
multi-nger, n+/n-well structure biased in a depletion-
accumulation mode, as shown in the Fig. 1. As the im-
plemented MOS varactor is a two-terminal device, G is
the poly gate and S/D is the connected source and drain
region. In the MOS varactor with this structure, the
depletion capacitance in the channel region dominated
when the gate-to-source (or drain) bias was negative,
but the gate oxide capacitance dominated when it was
positive. The designed devices were dened as the gate
length of 0.18-m, the unit nger width of 2-m, and the
number of ngers of 144 and the number of groups is 1,
3 and 6 for devices MTV1, MTV2 and MTV3, respec-
tively. Two-port S-parameter measurements have been
performed in the frequency range of 500 MHz-18 GHz
by using an HP8510C network analyzer and a Summit
Fig. 1. Structure of an MOS varactor.
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RF Modeling of an MOS Varactor and MIM Capacitor in Seong-Sik Song et al. -923-
Fig. 2. Equivalent circuit model of an MOS varactor.
11742 probe station. The parasitic eects of the probe
pads were de-embedded with open and short test pat-
terns.
The equivalent circuit model for an MOS varactor is
shown in Fig. 2. In this circuit, we lumped the gate-oxide
capacitance and the bulk-depletion capacitance into C
g
to model the behavior of the voltage-dependent capaci-
tance. R
g
is the total resistance including the parasitics
existing in the gate electrodes and the channel resistance
and C
sub1
is the depletion capacitance between n-well
and p-substrate. R
sub
and C
sub2
represent the parasitic
eect due to the substrate.
The S-parameters were measured for the devices at 19
gate bias (V
gs
) points from 1.8 V to 1.8 V in 0.2 V
steps. Then, we converted the measured S-parameters
to Y-parameters to obtain the parameters by using a di-
rect extraction technique. After the values of the model
parameters were extracted from the de-embedded Y-
parameters at each bias point, optimizations were per-
formed using the extracted model parameters as the ini-
tial values to minimize the error between the measured
and the simulated Y-parameters. Also, C
g
was tted
with Eq. (1) for various values of V
gs
[4]:
C
g
= C
g min
+dC
g0

1 + tanh

V
gs
dV
gs0
V
gsnorm

(1)
In Eq. (1), C
gmin
is the minimum value of C
g
and refers
to a series connection of the gate-oxide capacitance and
the minimum depletion capacitance. dC
g0
represents the
dierence between the maximum and the minimum val-
ues of C
g
. dV
gs0
is the value of the gate bias at which C
g
has maximum variation for varying V
gs
. V
gsnorm
deter-
mines the bias range with varying capacitance for vary-
ing V
gs
. Finally, a global optimization was performed to
nd the values of the model parameters by adjusting the
device characteristics in the overall bias range.
2. RF Modeling Results
Fig. 3. Dependence of measured and the simulated capac-
itances on the gate bias for the MOS varactors with dierent
number of groups.
Figure 3 shows the dependence of the measured and
the simulated capacitances on the gate bias of devices
MTV1, MTV2 and MTV3. Figure 4 shows the quality-
factor (Q-factor) as a function of the gate bias for device
MTV1 with the number of groups of 1. In this gure, the
Q-factor was calculated as the ratio of imaginary value to
real value of Y
11
at 2 GHz. Figure 5 shows the measured
and the simulated Y
11
of device MTV1 for V
gs
= 0.4
V and V
gs
= 0.2 V while gure 6 provides the measured
and the simulated Y
12
for the same device under the same
conditions.
To verify the accuracy of the model, we estimated
the simulated errors by using the relative mean error.
These were computed for all the components of the S-
parameters (S
ij
=S
11
, S
12
, S
21
, S
22
) by using the follow-
Fig. 4. Q-factor as a function of the gate bias for device
MTV1 at 2 GHz.
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Fig. 5. Measured and simulated results for Y
11
of device
MTV1.
Fig. 6. Measured and simulated results for Y
12
of device
MTV1.
ing formula:
E
ij
(%)=100
1
N M

N

1
M

1
|S
ij(meas)
S
ij(sim)
|
|S
ij(meas)
|
,
(2)
where N and M are the number of frequency points and
the number of bias conditions used, respectively. With
this relative mean error for the S-parameter, the model
tting errors were less than 3.6 % for MOS varactors in
the frequency range up to 6 GHz. From this fact, we
can conclude that although the RF model used in this
research is very simple, it predicts the characteristics of
the devices with high accuracy.
III. MODELING OF THE MIM CAPACITOR
1. RF Modeling
MIM capacitors with dierent device geometries were
also fabricated using 0.18-m CMOS technology. MIM
Fig. 7. Structure of an MIM capacitor.
Fig. 8. Equivalent circuit model of an MIM capacitor.
capacitors were designed with a two-port, parallel plate,
square structure with dierent sizes. The width of the
edge per side of the squares is 10, 15, 25 and 50-m.
Figure 7 shows the structure of an MIM capacitor. Two-
port S-parameter measurements were performed in the
same way as those for the MOS varactors, but only an
open test pattern was used to de-embed the parasitic
eects of the probe pads.
The equivalent circuit model for an MIM capacitor is
shown in Figure 8. In this circuit, C
s
is the main element
of the capacitor, R
s
and L
s
are the parasitics existing in
the electrodes, and C
ox1
and C
ox2
are the parasitics that
represent the capacitance to ground due to the bottom
and the top plate metal, respectively.
The RF modeling procedure for the MIM capacitors
was similar to that for the MOS varactors with the ex-
ception of the bias conditions and Eq. (1). After the
S-parameters were measured for the four test devices, we
converted those to Y-parameters to extract the param-
eters by using a direct extraction. Then, optimizations
RF Modeling of an MOS Varactor and MIM Capacitor in Seong-Sik Song et al. -925-
Table 1. Scaling rules for a square MIM capacitor with
L
top
in the range of 1050 m. L
MIM
is the edge per side of
the MIM layer in m.
R
s
[] 14.52 / L
MIM
+ 0.91
L
s
[pH] 404.63 / L
MIM
+ 132.82
C
s
[pF] 0.00106 (L
MIM
+ 0.388)
2
C
ox1
[fF] 7.5
C
ox2
[fF] 0.00220 (L
MIM
+ 55.893)
2
Fig. 9. Measured and simulated capacitances, C
s
, versus
L
MIM
using the scaling rule for an MIM capacitor.
were performed using the extracted model parameters as
the initial values. In the case of MIM capacitors, the RF
modeling procedure was applied to each device to de-
velop the scaling rules to describe the behavior of MIM
capacitors for various device geometries, as shown in Ta-
ble 1.
2. Modeling Results
Figure 9 shows the measured and the simulated capac-
itances C
s
versus L
MIM
, obtained by using scaling rule
for the MIM capacitor. Figure 10 shows the Q-factor as
a function of the frequency for an MIM capacitor with
the width of 50 m. In this gure, the Q-factor was cal-
culated as the ratio of the imaginary value to the real
value of Y
11
. Figure 11 shows the measured and the sim-
ulated Y
11
of an MIM capacitor with the width of 50 m
while Figure 12 provide the same information for Y
12
.
Table 1 shows the scaling rules developed by RF mod-
eling of the MIM capacitor. With the scaling rules in
Table 1, designers can select the size of the MIM capac-
itor to accurately predict the performance of the MIM
capacitor.
With Eq. (2), the model tting errors were less than
1.5 % for MIM capacitors in the frequency range up to 6
Fig. 10. Q-factor as a function of frequency for an MIM
capacitor with the width of 50 m.
Fig. 11. Measured and simulated results for Y
11
of an MIM
capacitor with the width of 50 m.
Fig. 12. Measured and simulated results for Y
12
of an MIM
capacitor with the width of 50 m.
GHz. In this case, the number of bias conditions, N, was
one. With this fact, we can conclude that although the
RF model used in this research is very simple, it predicts
the characteristics of the devices with high accuracy, as
did the RF model for MOS varactors.
-926- Journal of the Korean Physical Society, Vol. 41, No. 6, December 2002
IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper, RF modeling of MOS varactors and
MIM capacitors has been carried out in the frequency
range of GHz. The models obtained by this work can de-
scribe the behaviors of MOS varactors and MIM capac-
itors with various device geometries and bias conditions
at dierent operating frequencies. The simple models
developed in this paper show very excellent agreement
with measurements in the frequency range up to 6 GHz.
Thus, they should enable RF circuit designers to accu-
rately predict the performances of the MOS varactors
and MIM capacitors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported in part by the National Pro-
gram for Tera-Level Nano Devices through the Min-
istry of Science and Technology and the SystemIC 2010
project. The authors also thank Hynix Semiconductor
Inc. for the device fabrication.
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