A Novel Local-Dielectric-Thickening Technique for Performance Improvements of Spiral Inductors on Si Substrates

A novel local-dielectric-thickening technique is presented for performance improvements of Si-based spiral inductors.This technique employs the processes of deposition,photolithography,and wet-etching,to locally thicken the oxide layer under the inductor,which can decrease the substrate loss and improve the inductor performance.Both the structures and processes are compact,economical,and compatible with CMOS processing.Several square spiral inductors with different inductances are fabricated,and the quality factors and the self-resonant frequencies both increase clearly with this proposed technique:for the 10,5，and 2nH inductors,the peak quality factors are effectively improved by 46.7%,49.7%，and 686%,respectively;however,the improvement percents of the selfresonant frequencies are more significant,which are 92.1%,91.0%,and no less than 68.1%，respectively.

A Novel Local-Dielectric-Thickening Technique for Performance Improvements of Spiral Inductors on Si Substrates

A novel local-dielectric-thickening technique i s presented for performance improvements of Si-based spiral inductors.This technique employs the processes of deposition,photolithography,and wet-etching,to locally thicken the oxide layer under the inductor,which can decrease the substrate loss and improve the inductor performance.Both the structures and processes are compact,economical,and compatible with CMOS processing.Several square spiral inductors with different inductances are fabricated,and the quality factors and the self-resonant frequencies both increase clearly with this proposed technique:for the 10nH,5nH,and 2nH inductors,the peak quality factors are effectively improved by 46.7%,49.7%,and 68.6%,respectively;however,the improvement percents of the self-resonant frequencies are more significant,which are 92.1%,91.0%,and no less than 68.1% respectively.