Viable multiconductor spiral inductor design on silicon substrate with effective broadband shielding

The viable multiconductor spiral inductor designs on the silicon substrate with effective broadband shielding are presented. The synthetic edge-coupled transmission line (TL), which is operated in the even mode, is applied to realize the spiral inductor and provide the mesh ground shielding on the conventional silicon substrate for a well-defined interface with the system integration. The proposed two types of spiral inductors are fabricated by the standard 0.18-μm CMOS technology. For the high-quality factor (Q-factor) design, the measured result shows that the proposed inductor has the maximum Q-factor of 6.5 at 24.0 GHz, which is the same with that of conventional design without shielding ground plane. For the high-inductance design, the proposed shielded inductor reveals the inductance of 0.39 nH and Q-factor of 4.9 at 16.0 GHz, respectively, indicating 13.5% higher and 16.1% lower than that of the conventional design. Furthermore, the coupling between the two adjacent spiral inductors with edge-to-edge spacing of 80.0 μm is 60.0-to-80.0 dB, indicating approximately more than 40.0 dB improvement against reference design. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 53:2488–2492, 2011; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.26343