Robotic on-wafer probe station for microwave characterization in a scanning electron microscope

Abstract

The concept and first results of a novel instrumentation for microwave characterization at the micro-and nanoscale are presented. A nanorobotic on-wafer probing set-up is being developed and integrated into a high resolution scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The setup uses home-made miniaturized ground-signal-ground (GSG) probes with 1 µm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> tips contacts fabricated on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology. RF one-port measurements considering a coplanar test load with a 1.8 µm-width gap are presented for the first time up to 4 GHz.