A Precision On-Chip Measurement Technique for Dielectric Absorption of an Integrated Capacitor

This paper presents a precision dielectric absorption measurement method to characterize integrated capacitors. Conventional methods using an oscilloscope have measurement error due to the resolution limitation of the oscilloscope and the off-leakage current of the control switches. We improve the measurement accuracy by employing a switch without off-leakage current and a readout amplifier to minimize the influence of installation noise and environmental noise. Test chips were fabricated using a 0.18-μm CMOS process technology. The test chip consists of a metal-insulator-metal capacitor and measurement circuits. The measured standard deviations of the recovery level and short-term repeatability are 43.2 and 31.0 ppm, respectively. These results show that the proposed method is very accurate and stable compared with the conventional one.