Nichrome resistors are commonly used as part of the process of fabricating monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs). An effective MMIC model, however, must include an accurate model of a nichrome (NiCr) resistor. Fortunately, what follows is a methodology for the data-based parameter extraction required for developing an accurate NiCr resistor model. These resistors have been fabricated on gallium-arsenide (GaAs) semi-insulating substrates, and then are diced and bonded onto a coplanar-wave-guide (CPW) test fixture so that two-port scattering (S) parameters can be measured over a wide band of frequencies. An algorithm based on the de-embedded S-parameters has been developed to extract the electrical parameters of an equivalent circuit for the NiCr resistor. The frequency-dependent model parameters have been extracted to 15 GHz for a large number of resistors of varying geometries and curve-fitted equations for the model parameters have been obtained. As will be shown, the model-predicted S-parameters agree closely with the measured results.

MMICs consist of planar integrated active and passive elements that determine the circuit operation. Passive elements are composed of lumped elements such as resistors, capacitors, and inductors and distributed elements such as transmission lines. In MMIC technology, the resistors are extensively used in feedback circuits, bias circuits, and as terminations. Two types of resistors are commonly used in MMIC fabrication, namely, thin films of lossy metals and lightly doped GaAs active layer (mesa resistors).¹ Metal thin-film resistors are more temperature stable and are used as precision resistors of low to moderate values. These are usually fabricated from TaN and NiCr although other metals may be used.^1,2 NiCr resistors have low thermal coefficient of resistance (TCR), small parasitic values, and are widely used in a variety of circuit designs ^3,4

The resistors in this research were grown in-house by means of RF sputtering. NiCr resistors have been grown on 200-µm semi-insulating GaAs substrates with 1.0-µm-thick polymide used as the passivating layer. The sheet resistance is typically about 40 Ω/square and the TCR is about 250 × 10⁻⁶/°C. The resistor values selected for this work range from 5 Ω to 2 kΩ.

Figure 1 shows a top view of a typical NiCr resistor with input and output pads. For RF characterization of the diced resistors, the authors designed a CPW test card with 50-Ω input and output lines (Fig. 2). The resistor chip is die bonded onto the ground plane of the card and the resistor terminals are wire bonded to the input/output (I/O) signal lines by means of 1-mil-diameter gold bond wires. The bonded chips are then characterized for small-signal S-parameters to 15 GHz using ground-signal-ground (G-S-G) wafer probes from Cascade Microtech (Beaverton, OR) and an 8510C microwave vector network analyzer (VNA) from Agilent Technologies (Santa Rosa, CA) in conjunction with the Cascade Microtech probe station.

The two-port S-parameters of the bonded resistor chips were measured at the CPW Test Card I/O planes 1 −1 and 2 −2 as shown in Fig. 2. Multiple-step de-embedding was carried out to extract the S-parameters at the resistor places 1´ −1´ and 2´ −2´ by using software from Agilent-EEsof (Santa Rosa, CA). Bond-wire and bond-pad models used in this analysis are given below.

The inductance of the bond wire can be calculated from the following expression:⁵

SEE EQ. 1

where:

d = the diameter of the gold wire and
l = the length.

For 1-mil-diameter bond wire, the value of L_BW comes out to be 0.7 nH/mm. The bond-pad capacitance can be obtained from the GEC-Marconi foundry model⁶ using the expression:

SEE EQ. 2

where:

W = the dimension of the square bond pad (in µm)

The bond pad used for this study measures 10 × 100 µm and the corresponding value of C_BP is 0.028 pF.

Figure 3 shows the electrical lumped-element equivalent-circuit model for the NiCr resistor. In this model, R represents the RF resistance of the device under test (DUT), L is the series inductance, which is due to the finite length of the transmission-line length associated with the resistor, and C is the shunt capacitance which accounts for the RF fringing fields to the ground plane. This model assumes a symmetrical fringing capacitance due to the symmetry of the resistor structure. For the two-port circuit in Fig. 3, the Y-parameters are related to the element values by: