Electrical performance of vertical natural capacitor for RF system-on-chip in 32-nm technology

Radio frequency system-on-chips (RF SoC) require high quality passive devices such as capacitors. We comprehensively studied the vertical natural capacitors (VNCAP) made of CMOS back-end-of-lines (BEOL) in 32-nm technology. We used electromagnetic simulation and a Pi-type equivalent circuit model for the study of the VNCAP, and reported its electrical characteristics including the scattering parameter, effective capacitance, self-resonant frequency and quality factor up to 20 GHz. We also briefly discussed the performance scaling trend of VNCAPs from 65-nm to 32-nm technology.