Abstract— In this paper, the propagation characteristics of an enhanced-thickness magnetic nanoparticle thin film are investigated on high resistivity silicon substrate (10,000 ohm-cm) for the first time up to 60 GHz. Contrary to other thin films, this nanoparticle thin film can achieve a thickness up to several hundred nanometers, even to micron. The enhanced thickness of this thin film is achieved by repeated coating of CoFe 2 O 4 and poly, thus providing the thin film with the high permeability capable of potential practical wireless applications. Finite Ground Coplanar (FGC) waveguides are fabricated and characterized on silicon with the novel thin film. The measured attenuation and effective dielectric/magnetic constant are reported. Results show that the FGC waveguides with the thin film feature a lower attenuation compared to those on silicon for frequencies higher than 18 GHz. The extracted relative permeability has a value of 68 by matching of the effective dielectric/magnetic constant between simulation and measurement. Index Terms— Magnetic thin film, Nanoparticle, Coplanar waveguide, high-permeability materials, FGC I. INTRODUCTION riven by the demand of monolithic microwave integration, magnetic nanoparticle thin films [1]-[2] with high r μ developed on CMOS compatible process, find numerous applications in high-speed wireless communication systems, (e.g. integrated inductors [3]-[5]), integrated electromagnetic noise countermeasures [6], and sensing [7]-[8]. In the traditional integrated spiral inductors with a good low quality factor, it is hard to achieve large inductance values even with an increased number of turns. As a result, a large area of the chip is occupied by inductors. Magnetic thin films, meanwhile, with high permeability, have the potential to provide compact integrated inductors with high inductance and good quality factors due to the reduced loss and the fact that the flux is constrained in the thin film instead of the whole substrate. Fig. 1. The SEM picture of the enhanced-thickness magnetic nanoparticle thin film. For integrated electromagnetic noise countermeasure applications, magnetic thin films provide a large attenuation in the desired stop band, while sustaining the insertion loss in the passband. For sensing applications, the large permeability of the thin film enhances its sensitivity. Novel Enhanced-Thickness Magnetic Nanoparticle Thin-Films for System-On-Chip (SOC) Wireless Applications Yuan Li 1 , Hyungie Doo 2 , Bo Pan 1 , Manos M. Tentzeris 1 , Z. John Zhang 2 , and John Papapolymerou 1 1. Georgia Electronic Design Center, School of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332; 2. School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332 D Fig. 2. Schematic of the thin film coating process. 978-1-4244-1780-3/08/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE 97 Authorized licensed use limited to: Georgia Institute of Technology. Downloaded on December 15, 2008 at 17:26 from IEEE Xplore. Restrictions apply.