High-Q on-chip transmission line for CMOS MMIC applications

Summary from only given. A high quality factor transmission line structure with shielded ground plane and curved side-walls is proposed for CMOS MMIC applications. The structure is optimized, fabricated and characterized up to 40 GHz. Instead of conventional open, short and thru de-embedding methods which consume a large chip area, a simple yet accurate de-embedding method using lines with two different lengths is employed. Simulated and measured data are compared which shows a good agreement between them. The extracted line parameters are studied and it is seen that even with the shielded ground; the quality factor of the line degrades at very high frequency due to the substrate loss.