Impact of technology scaling on electrical characteristics of through-silicon via correlated with equivalent circuits

Through-silicon via (TSV) technology is one of the enabling technologies for the next generation of advanced three-dimensional circuit integration. We first investigate the impact of technology scaling on the electrical characteristics of TSVs in terms of scattering parameters up to 40 GHz. This covers the geometry scaling predicted by the ITRS 2010 for TSVs, different TSV metals and substrate materials. Two opposite trends for insertion loss of TSVs are found when the TSV diameter is scaled down from 18 μm to 4 μm and beyond. Furthermore, we extract the equivalent circuits of TSVs in the form of a Γ type circuitry with resistance, inductance, capacitance, and conductance (RLCG) lumped elements from the scattering parameters. This results in a better understanding of the trends of TSV scattering parameters, and the correlations between electrical characteristics of TSVs and their equivalent RLCG circuit.