A wide frequency band characterization technique for multiple-terminal discrete decoupling capacitors

Abstract

This paper describes an effective characterization method developed for frequency-dependent electrical characteristics of multiple-terminal chip capacitors used widely in power delivery networks in today's high-speed digital applications. This technique achieves excellent accuracy across a wide frequency range in the chip capacitor application on a digital ASIC substrate compared to conventional ESR and ESL extraction methods. To ensure the developed circuit models cover the wide frequency range, multiple branches of RLC elements are proposed to capture the higher-order frequency response of the chip capacitor impedance. The characterization procedure consists of carefully designed test fixtures, two-port VNA measurements, a de-embedding process, and circuit modeling and simulation. Simulation results demonstrated using this method is further correlated with a frequency limited de-embedded s-parameters from measurements.