A new method to characterize substrate conductivity

Transmission line structures are traditionally used to characterize the substrate conductivity. However this method needs dedicated designed structures to characterize the substrate loss. Moreover this method can not provide the information about the conductive layer if the depth of the embedded conductive layer is unknown. To overcome this problem a new method based on the Y-parameters of an open dummy is proposed to characterize the properties of the embedded conductive layer. This proposed method only needs the open dummy which is commonly available on an RF mask design. Moreover this method can give the properties of the conductive layer independent of the depth of the embedded conductive layer.