Design and Optimization Methodology of Coplanar Waveguide Test Structures for Dielectric Characterization of Thin Films

This paper describes an accurate design method of coplanar waveguide (CPW) test structures on characterizing dielectric properties of thin films with arbitrary thickness. Current CPW measurement method has difficulty in providing accurate dielectric properties of films with extremely small thickness. To address this issue, an optimized algorithm is presented to generate proper geometric parameters of CPW test structures for films with different thickness. To validate the accuracy of the proposed design methodology, various test cases of CPW structures with different dimensions have been designed and implemented, the extracted dielectric properties (e.g., dielectric constant and loss tangent) from the S-parameters of the different test cases are compared to the benchmark results simulated by accurate electromagnetic tool Ansys HFSS. It demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed optimized method on quickly producing correct dimensions of CPW test lines for accurate properties characterization of thin films.