Ultra low-capacitance bond pad for RF applications in CMOS technology

Abstract

A low-capacitance bond pad for gigahertz RF applications is proposed. Three kinds of on-chip inductors embedded under the traditional bond pad are used to compensate bond-pad capacitance. Experimental results have verified that bond-pad capacitance can be significantly reduced in a specific frequency band due to the cancellation effect provided by the embedded inductor in the proposed bond pad. The proposed bond pad is fully compatible to general CMOS processes without any process modification.