Systematic Analysis and Modeling of On-Chip Spiral Inductors for Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Applications

Abstract

In this work, a simplified model for on-chip spiral inductors was developed to accurately predict key parameters in the giga hertz range, i.e., peak quality factor Qpeak, frequency at peak quality factor fpeak, and self-resonance frequency fSR. To save area on the test-key layout, inductors were laid out with a ground-signal-ground-signal-ground (GSGSG) pad structure. In addition, we used two conventional ground-signal-ground (GSG) probes to measure the inductors with the GSGSG pad structures to save the cost of GSGSG probes. Very good fits between the predicted and the measured data indicate the suitability of the model and the new pad structure.