Scalable lumped modeling of single-ended and differential inductors for RF IC design

Abstract

A lumped scalable model of silicon integrated inductors for RF IC design is presented. It was validated up to 20 GHz using measured performance parameters of more than 70 single-ended and differentially driven spirals covering 0.2-to 8.3 nH inductance values. Excellent accuracy, full geometrical scalability, compactness and high capability for implementation in circuit simulators promote the proposed model as a reliable time-saving design tool. Two circuital example, i.e., 5-GHz down-converter and 10-GHz VCO, are also presented to demonstrate its use in practical cases.

A SiGe BiCMOS 24-GHz receiver front-end for automotive short-range radar

“…The design of inductive components was carried out using extensive EM simulations to optimize the layout parameters and then accurate lumped compact models [13,14] were extracted for circuit simulations. Finally, postlayout analysis was performed to account for parasitics.…”

A Comparative Analysis between Standard and mm-Wave Optimized BEOL in a Nanoscale CMOS Technology

“…This approach is motivated by the considerations discussed below. Integrated transformers are very important passive components, especially at mm-wave frequencies, since they are extensively adopted to implement several crucial functions, such as single-ended-to-differential and differential-to-single-ended conversions along with electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection at input/output antenna interfaces [13][14][15][16][17], resonant load in RF/mm-wave amplification stages [18,19], LC tank in oscillators [20][21][22], power combining [23,24], etc. Moreover, differently from simple spiral inductors that can highly benefit from top thick metal along with multi-layer structures and maximum oxide thickness to outdistance from the substrate, integrated transformer configurations provide more complete information on the BEOL, since they also include the effects of lower metals and intermetal oxide thickness.…”

A 24/77‐GHz SiGe BiCMOS transmitter chipset for automotive radar

“…On the other hand, the 77‐GHz transformers (i.e., T 1 , T 2 , and T 3 ) do not exploit this layout arrangement since the benefits at such high frequency are negligible, while the PGS considerably increases the capacitive parasitic and hence reduces the actual transformer f SR . A preliminary draft sizing of the integrated transformer was carried out by taking advantage of simple lumped models [12–14], while final design was achieved using EM simulations that also allows taking into account the layout coupling effects, as the ones due to the ground plane [15–17].…”