Scalable Modeling of Spiral Inductor in 0.13 μm RF CMOS Process

This paper presents the scalable modeling of spiral inductors for RFIC design based on 0.13 mu m RF CMOS process. Usually, scalable modeling requires so many patterns with variations in their width, number of turns and inner radius. To save the area of test patterns and time for modeling, this work utilizes the width-scaling approach. At first, inductor patterns with a single width are fully fabricated and modeled with many variations in the number of turns and inner radius. Then, inductors with other widths are modeled based on the established scalable model with a fixed width. The width scaling factor is easily obtained by using a small set of patterns with different widths. The inductor library provides two types of models including standard and symmetric inductors. The standard and symmetric inductors have the range of 0.12 similar to 10.7nH and 0.08 similar to 13.6nH respectively. The frequency range of the developed models is below 30GHz or self-resonance frequency. Average error rate of the scalable inductor library is below 10%.