The Modeling, Optimization Design And Applications Of Rf On-chip Spiral Inductors

In order to meet the demand of the fast-growing requirement of the wireless communications market, it is necessary to study the high-performance cell circuits and the high quality factor passive components, so the spiral inductors become the development bottleneck of the radio frequency systems due to the low cost and easy integration into the chip,. This paper mainly studies in three research directions of the spiral inductors, that is the establishment of accurate inductor RLC model, the optimization design of the on-chip inductor and the improving of the inductor quality factor.Firstly, a simple spiral inductor equivalent circuit model, which is used to extract parameters based on the partial element equivalent circuit methodology combined with using C++ to calculate, is proposed. Each component of the equivalent circuit (PEEC) model has obvious physical meaning, which can reflect the distributional effects such as skin effects, proximity effects in spiral inductor effectively. The validity of the method is proved by comparing with the results of full-wave analysis method among a comparatively large frequency range, so it is both efficient and feasible. It can be extensively used in the optimization design and simulation of the multilayer embedded RF passives circuits.Secondly, an optimization technique, which based on the physical model of inductor as well as the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm for radio frequency (RF) spiral inductors, is presented. Fixed with the technology parameters and the working frequency, the PSO method can be used to find the largest quality factor (Q ). It is found that our results are well in agreement with those of the Q-value lines and the 3D electromagnetic simulation software with relative error within 2.80%. Simulation experiments have been showed that the new technique can yield sufficient accuracy and efficient computation.Finally, spiral inductor optimization technique which is proposed in this paper is used to design the low pass filter, whose cut-off frequency is 2.4GHz. The main performance of the LPF is simulated by the ADS software. By comparing the previous results with the ones after optimization, it is found that the method can improve efficiently the LPF performance, and the correctness and practicality of the optimization technique are proved of.