| The wireless communication revolution has spawned a revival of interest in the design and optimization of radio transceivers. Passive elements such as inductors, capacitors, and transformers have the potential to improve the performance of key RF building blocks. Their use, though, not only necessitates proper modeling of electrostatic and magnetostatic effects, but also electromagnetic parasitic substrate coupling.; This work focuses on the analysis and application of such passive devices. From Maxwell's equations, an accurate and efficient technique is developed to model the device over a wide frequency range. In particular, we demonstrate techniques for calculating the loss when such devices are fabricated in the vicinity of conductive substrates such as silicon. Energy couples to a conductive substrate through several mechanisms, such as through electrically induced displacement and conductive currents, and by magnetically induced eddy currents. Green functions for Poisson's equation and the eddy current partial differential equations are derived and employed to account for the various loss mechanisms. Numerical techniques are developed to efficiently and accurately compute the underlying Green functions. These techniques have been compiled in a user-friendly software tool, ASITIC, "Analysis and Simulation of Inductors and Transformers for Integrated Circuits". This tool allows circuit and process engineers to design and optimize the geometry of passive devices and the process parameters to meet electrical specifications.; Two key RF building block applications, a 4.4 GHz voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) and a distributed amplifier, are presented. In the VCO, the center-tapped monolithic inductor is at the heart of the resonant tank, a key component in determining the phase noise and power dissipation in the VCO. In the distributed amplifier, lumped inductors and capacitors, or on-chip transmission lines, allow broadband operation. The losses in the passive devices determine the achievable gain and power dissipation. Optimization of such passive devices is thus integral in the design of such building blocks. |
