High-strongQstrong RF coils on silicon integrated circuits.pdfVIP

High-Q RF coils on silicon integrated circuits + Christopher L. Chua , David K. Fork, Koenraad Van Schuylenbergh, Jeng-Ping Lu Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304 ABSTRACT We report on out-of-plane micro-machined inductors exhibiting record high quality factors (Q) on silicon integrated circuits. The coils are made by three-dimensional self-assembly of stress-engineered structures fabricated with standard semiconductor batch processing techniques. Coils fabricated on low resistance CMOS-compatible silicon exhibit quality factors of over 70 at 1 GHz. BiCMOS test oscillators utilizing these micro-machined coils show significant phase noise reduction over similar oscillators using conventional spiral coils. 1. INTRODUCTION High Q coils that can be integrated on silicon circuits have been an elusive goal for many years. Today, many radio- frequency integrated circuits (RFICs) requiring high performance inductors rely on off-chip discrete coils. Some circuits are even built from discretes in a modular assembly. Integrated high Q coils, if available, can transform the economics, size and power consumption of many RF circuits. The Q-factor of current state-of-the-art inductors on conventional unaltered CMOS silicon is about 10. This low Q is attributed to fundamental limitations associated with coil designs involving variations of the pancake configuration shown in Figure 1a1,2. With the coil axis perpendicular to the wafer surface, large amounts of magnetic flux penetrate the substrate and induce