Abstract: A novel shielding scheme is developed by inserting a concave shield between a metal–insulator–metal (MIM) capacitor and the silicon substrate. Chip measurements reveal that the concave shield improves the quality factor by 11% at 11.8 GHz and 14% at 18.8 GHz compared with an unshielded MIM capacitor. It also alleviates the effect on shunt capacitance between the bottom plate of the MIM capacitor and the shield layer. Moreover, because the concave shields simplify substrate modeling, a simple circuit model of the MIM capacitor with concave shield is presented for radio frequency applications.

Key words: MIM capacitor,  concave shield,  quality factor,  model