Silicon Integrated Inductors And Cmos Rf Integrated Circuits

With the rapid growth of wireless communication markets, Si RFIC is recognized as a fascinating candidate to meet the demands of low-cost, high integration, and mature technologies. Currently, technology scaling allows CMOS processes to operate at RF and a great effort is underway to obtain a monolithic solution that meets mobile telecommunication standard specifications. To date, most research on CMOS RF circuits is focused on CMOS RF front-end including some key building blocks such as low-noise amplifier (LNA), mixer, bandpass filters, voltage control oscillators and power amplifiers.In Si RF 1C, inductors need be realized on a silicon substrate along with all of the other devices in a single chip. In fact, the need for high Q integrated inductors in RFICs is increasing. The aim of our research is to realize high-Q and high-resonant frequency monolithic inductors in standard Si CMOS technology and to carry out the integrated inductors in some novel CMOS radio frequency ICs.The researches of integrated inductors and its related RF integrated circuits are reported in this dissertation. Major contents and results of the study are abstracted as following:1. The review of integrated inductors is given and the structure and model of integrated inductors are introduced. The sense and the expression of the quality factor of integrated inductors are explained and induced. Available methods of improving the quality factor of integrated inductors and the applications of the integrated inductors in RF 1C are summarized.2. The transmission line model of integrated inductors are presented and the procedure of extracting parasitic parameters of integrated inductors are induced to created an equation of parasitic parameters. A series of planar spiral integrated inductors are designed and fabricated. Methods of calculating the inductor's quality factor and inductance are studied. Experimental results are analyzed in detail and some results are obtained: quality factor Q decreasing with the increase of turns N; inductance L proportional to turns N2; series resistance Rs increasing-IV-________________________as g-____________________________with frequency due to skin effect. These analysis and results are important and useful for the design of integrated inductors.3. A novel method for reducing the substrate-rated losses of integrated spiral inductors is presented. The method is that directly forming pn junction isolation in the Si substrate to block the eddy currents induced by spiral inductors. The substrate pn junction can be realized in standard silicon technologies without additional processing steps. Integrated 'inductors on silicon are designed and fabricated. S parameters of the inductors based equivalent circuit are investigated and the inductor parameters are calculated from the measured data. The impacts of the substrate pn junction isolation on the inductor quality factor (Q) are studied and experimental results show that a certain deep substrate pn junction isolation achieves good improvement.4. A novel structure of on-chip integrated inductors implemented in conventional Si process is presented as lateral solenoid. Detailed experimental results of solenoid inductors are presented which are comparable to conventional planar spiral inductors, some results of the novel integrated inductor are obtained: quality factor Q and inductance increasing greatly with the increase of width W; inductance L proportional to turns N; series resistance Rs increasing with frequency due to skin effect. These analysis and results are important and useful for the design of integrated inductors.5. Special issues to implement the RF integrated circuits are discussed. Important building blocks of CMOS RF front end are discussed and the possibilities and methods to integrated passive components in the RF band are figured out. The DC characterization and fT characterization are modeled.6. CMOS distributed amplifier is researched for the first t...