ABSTRACT
Capacitors are the most challenging among all the passives. The never-ending demand for the high-performance, portable electronics has propelled the need for miniaturization of electronic components, including the capacitors. There are also several issues, though, with the integration of existing tantalum-based capacitors into the silicon package. Capacitor arrays can be formed in a planar format with multiple independent terminals that are compatible with a thin silicon integrated circuit stack on the top. The chapter discusses one aspect of the passive components, that is, the state-of-the-art high-density capacitor technologies, benchmarking them against their capacitance densities, silicon and package compatibility, low-cost manufacturable processes, and electrical properties such as leakage current and breakdown voltages. It focuses a new class of nanocapacitor technologies. The chapter describes foil nanocapacitors, silicon trench nanocapacitors, and nanoparticulate-based capacitors. Depositing conformal high-permittivity dielectrics over larger areas is critical to form the capacitor and usually requires vapor deposition techniques such as chemical vapor deposition and atomic layer deposition.
