A Scaleable Technique for the Measurement of Intrinsic MOS Capacitance with Atto-Farad Resolution

An on-chip capacitance measurement technique used for interline capacitances has been extended to MOS transistor capacitance measurements. The gate of the test transistor is connected to a reference capacitance made on the same chip. Small ac signals are applied to one of the transistor terminals successively. The magnitude of the ac voltages appearing on the gate node is measured indirectly. C/sub gd/,C/sub gs/ and C/sub gb/ are calculated accurately from the measured ac voltage and the reference capacitance value. It was found that C/sub gd/ and C/sub gs/, are measured completely free of parasitic capacitances resulting from both the internal on-chip circuit and external wiring. The on-chip circuit is simple and can easily be scaled down. These features insure this technique is the most suitable for the measurement of minimum-geometry transistors with atto-Farad-range resolution. It is shown that this technique has the ability to detect the capacitance difference which comes from the misalignment of source and drain metal connections. Measurements with this technique are used to first describe the short- and narrow-channel effects on MOS transistor capacitance.