Design of MCI single and symmetrical on-chip spiral inductors**Project supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61401101), the Anhui Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Nos. 1408085QF122, 1608085QF159), the Open Research Program of State Key Laboratory of Millimeter Waves, Southeast University (No. K201401), and the Anhui Provincial Outstanding Top-notch Talent Cultivation Project (No. gxfxZD2016164).

Abstract

In this paper, the MCI (multipath crossover interconnection) technique for octagon single and symmetrical spiral inductors has been presented to improve the quality factor. The metal wires of the single and symmetrical inductors formed by the top metal are divided into multiple segments according to the depth of the skin effects. The outermost path of the metal is crossover-interconnected to the innermost path by the underlayer metal and via The crossover technique makes the lengths of the total current paths between two ports approximately equal to each other. Therefore, the induced magnetic flux and resistance of each path can be balanced and the Q-factor of spiral inductors can be enhanced. The proposed MCI technique has been validated by the electromagnetic simulation with the 130-nm 1P6M SiGe BiCMOS process. For the devices with occupying areas of 240 × 240 μm, results of electromagnetic simulation show that about 24% improvement in the Q-peak (3.3 GHz) of the MCI single inductor as compared to conventional single inductors (3.1 GHz), and about 88.1% improvement in the Q-peak (3.2 GHz) of the MCI symmetrical inductor as compared to conventional symmetrical inductors (1.8 GHz).