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Measuring out-of-plane permittivity of thin films to millimeter wave frequencies

Published by National Institute of Standards and Technology | National Institute of Standards and Technology | Catalog Last Checked: September 10, 2026 at 05:53 PM | Dataset Last Updated: October 22, 2024
This data repository is the basis for the figures in the manuscript "Measuring out-of-plane permittivity of thin films to millimeter wave frequencies" , F. Bergmann et al. (2025), accepted for publication in IEEE TMTT. The abstract is as follows: Modern microchips use multilayer stack-ups with many interstitial layers of dielectrics. Optimizing device performance and maximizing yield requires precise measurements of the out-of-plane permittivity of these dielectric layers. At the same time, high-performance microchips are pushing operating frequencies into the millimeter-wave range, requiring precise materials property knowledge at these frequencies to perform as intended. With this context, one outstanding challenge is to accurately measure out-of-plane permittivity of thin films. Unfortunately, the conventional method to extract this property, the metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitor technique, produces inconsistent and therefore unreliable material data for frequencies above a few gigahertz. To address these inconsistencies, we designed an experiment with on-wafer devices of varying topology and varying geometry. We chose to study silicon nitride for this experiment because it is an ubiquitous dielectric in microchips, widely accepted as approximately dispersionless, and available with established processes in our cleanroom. Our experiment resulted in an out-of-plane permittivity of thin film silicon nitride of 𝜺𝒓 = 7.0±0.1 and a loss tangent of tanδ < 0.03 up to 90 GHz. Our key findings about improving on-wafer calibrations and modeling of the MIM devices will help material scientists and microchip designers to obtain reliable permittivity data on thin films at millimeter wave frequencies.

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Complete Metadata
@type dcat:Dataset
accessLevel public
accrualPeriodicity irregular
bureauCode 
[
  "006:55"
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contactPoint 
{
  "fn": "Florian Bergmann",
  "hasEmail": "mailto:florian.bergmann@nist.gov"
}
description This data repository is the basis for the figures in the manuscript "Measuring out-of-plane permittivity of thin films to millimeter wave frequencies" , F. Bergmann et al. (2025), accepted for publication in IEEE TMTT. The abstract is as follows: Modern microchips use multilayer stack-ups with many interstitial layers of dielectrics. Optimizing device performance and maximizing yield requires precise measurements of the out-of-plane permittivity of these dielectric layers. At the same time, high-performance microchips are pushing operating frequencies into the millimeter-wave range, requiring precise materials property knowledge at these frequencies to perform as intended. With this context, one outstanding challenge is to accurately measure out-of-plane permittivity of thin films. Unfortunately, the conventional method to extract this property, the metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitor technique, produces inconsistent and therefore unreliable material data for frequencies above a few gigahertz. To address these inconsistencies, we designed an experiment with on-wafer devices of varying topology and varying geometry. We chose to study silicon nitride for this experiment because it is an ubiquitous dielectric in microchips, widely accepted as approximately dispersionless, and available with established processes in our cleanroom. Our experiment resulted in an out-of-plane permittivity of thin film silicon nitride of 𝜺𝒓 = 7.0±0.1 and a loss tangent of tanδ < 0.03 up to 90 GHz. Our key findings about improving on-wafer calibrations and modeling of the MIM devices will help material scientists and microchip designers to obtain reliable permittivity data on thin films at millimeter wave frequencies.
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identifier ark:/88434/mds2-3560
issued 2026-02-19
keyword 
[
  "MIM",
  "Microwaves",
  "Permittivity",
  "Thin film",
  "Wafer",
  "mmWaves"
]
landingPage https://data.nist.gov/od/id/mds2-3560
language 
[
  "en"
]
license https://www.nist.gov/open/license
modified 2024-10-22 00:00:00
programCode 
[
  "006:045"
]
publisher 
{
  "name": "National Institute of Standards and Technology",
  "@type": "org:Organization"
}
theme 
[
  "Advanced Communications",
  "Electronics:Electromagnetics",
  "Electronics:Thin-film electronics",
  "Materials:Materials characterization",
  "Metrology:Electrical/electromagnetic metrology"
]
title Measuring out-of-plane permittivity of thin films to millimeter wave frequencies

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