This meeting was held in Madrid during EuMW 2018  on 27 September 2018. It was attended by approximately 20 people representing research institutes, universities and industry companies around the globe.

The meeting started with the conversation about the need for establishing recommendations for wafer-level measurements. Nick Ridler (NPL, UK), MTT Standards Liaison, discussed possibilities within the IEEE Standards process and suggested it might be time for the group to consider creating a working group with the aim of generating a Recommended Practice.

It was noted that such a group should also include on-wafer data users (e.g., designers and modeling engineers from industry) as well as those who are more measurement-centric.

Nick Ridler (NPL, UK) discussing IEEE Standard process. Photocourtesy of Andrej Rumiantsev

Gai Ngoc Phung (FBH, Germany) presented a talk on what was learned about on-wafer calibrations from the European PlanarCal project, which recently concluded. Among items discussed were the impact of probe geometry, radiation and dispersion, and substrate modes.

Gai Ngoc Phung (FBH, Germany) presents selected results of the PlanarCal Project. Photo courtesy of Andrej Rumiantsev

Ryo Sakamaki (AIST, Japan) presented a talk on on-wafer measurements by beginner operators. Among the sub-topics discussed were probe planarization techniques and the challenges presented by TRL calibration to the novice operator (lateral probe motion).

Ryo Sakamaki (AIST, Japan) discussed automated procedure for RF probes alignment. Picture courtesy: Andrej Rumiantsev

Andrej Rumiantsev (MPI, Taiwan) started a discussion on the location(s) of on-wafer calibration reference planes. The challenges of which reference planes to use (and how to get to them with calibration/de-embedding techniques) in high-metal-layer-count processes were part of the discussion.

At the end of the meeting, the topic of lumped element calibrations and challenges including the calibration reference impedance was started and will be continued at future meetings.

The next meeting is tentatively scheduled to occur with the winter ARFTG meeting (during RWW week in January 2019).