Microfabrication of toroidal inductors integrated with nanolaminated ferromagnetic metallic cores

Abstract

We report microfabricated toroidal inductors with nanolaminated ferromagnetic metallic cores for chip-scale, high-power switching converters. The fabrication process of the toroidal inductor is based on individual manufacturing of partial windings (i.e. bottom and vertical conductors) and nanolaminated magnetic core, and integrating them by means of a drop-in approach. The nanolaminated ferromagnetic metallic cores presented in this paper consist of many multilayers of electrodeposited CoNiFe films, each layer with sub-micron thickness, with a total core thickness exceeding tens of microns. The beneficial magnetic properties (i.e. high saturation flux density and low coercivity) of CoNiFe alloys are well suited for chip-scale inductors as they achieve both large energy storage capacity as well as minimized volumetric core losses at high operating frequencies due to their nanolaminated structure. A drop-in integration approach, introduced to combine the microfabricated toroidal inductor windings with the magnetic cores, allows ease of integration. An advantage of this hybrid approach over monolithic fabrication in this application is the potential use of a wide variety of core materials, both microfabricated and bulk-fabricated, and which may or may not ultimately be CMOS-compatible. Exploiting this drop-in approach, 30-turn- and 50-turn-toroidal inductors integrated with nanolaminated CoNiFe cores, having 10 mm outer diameter and 1 mm thickness, have been successfully developed. Both types of inductors exhibit inductances higher than 1 µH at frequencies up to tens of MHz, showing ten times the inductance of an air core device with the same nominal geometry. The peak quality factor of the 30-turn-toroidal inductor reaches 18 at 1 MHz.