Radio Frequency Characterization and Modelling of Low Temperature Co-Fired Ceramic (LTCC) Material and Devices

The focus of this dissertation is on the characterization of Low Temperature Co-fired Ceramic (LTCC) for microwave and Radio Frequency (RF) applications. The LTCC substrates' excellent microwave properties make them great candidates for the packaging of RF devices, as well as the fabrication of passive RF and microwave components. In order to utilize LTCC, the first step is to characterize its microwave properties including the dielectric constant and loss tangent which will enable designers to design and simulate the RF behavior of LTCC components accurately. Investigating various measurement techniques, we decided to use a parallel plate capacitor for the characterization of a LTCC substrate from 100 MHz to 1 GHz and a conductor backed coplanar waveguide from 1 GHz to 10 GHz. After fabrication of several test structures on Dupont 951 LTCC substrates, the scattering parameters were measured using a 110 GHz Vector Network Analyzer and the effect of the pads were de-embedded from measurement results. Through this process, we developed a novel fast de-embedding method which de-embeds the effect of the pads and parts of the transmission lines as opposed to the conventional method, where only the effect of the pads is removed. This will result in a similar electromagnetic field around the de-embedded structure to that of a test structure where no pad exists. Therefore, the proposed de-embedding method produces more accurate loss tangent and dielectric constant results compared to the conventional method.