Design and Test of Integrated Inductors for RF Applications (Electronic book text)

Design and Test of Integrated Inductors for RF Applications is the result of several years of research in the field of Radio-Frequency Integrated Circuit Design, specifically in the Inductor design for RF applications in conventional technologies. One of the key elements today in the wireless industry, especially in the silicon RF integrated circuits field, is the design of high-quality passive elements. The performance of several basic circuit blocks such as low noise amplifiers, mixers and voltage controlled oscillators depends on the quality of these elements. The work done establishes the design guidelines for the definition of the inductor's geometrical characteristics and new techniques to improve their quality. It also covers their measurement and characterisation. This fact is not always taken into account by the designers due to the lack of information in bibliography regarding to this topic. The novelty of this work lies in that it covers and studies the whole design flow of an inductor. From the definition and analysis of the physical effects that appear in them to their modelization, it covers issues such as the maximization of the quality by a correct definition of the geometry, novel aggressive design rules, a design flow for the definition of the inductor's geometry, selection of the measurement equipment, de-embedding, determination of the relation that exists between the measurement configuration and the circuit model used in the characterization, source of errors, etc. Design and Test of Integrated Inductors for RF Applications is intended for engineers who are starting out in the design of integrated inductors, this due to the fact that it describes the whole designflow, basic selection of the geometry, optimisation of the quality by redesigning the geometry, measurement and de-embedding and characterisation. Secondly it will help the designer with much experience in this field, this due to the fact that, based on empirical data, some design rules that have been widely used by the design community have been proved to be really conservative and breaking them leads up to higher quality designs.