A Miniature Stacked Spiral Inductor Utilizing a Proposed Taper Structure for RFIC Size Reduction

A miniature CMOS monolithic stacked spiral inductors were implemented by using a standard 0.13 mum one-poly-eight-metal (1P8M) Radio Frequency (RF) CMOS technology. The proposed taper geometry for enhanced quality factor (Q-factor) and the stacking technique for size reduction were employed. According to the measurement results, the proposed inductors are only 8% size occupation of the conventional standard inductor with the same inductance and their Q is about 50% higher than the conventional stacked inductor. In addition, a 6-GHz CMOS RF amplifier using the proposed inductors has been demonstrated to justify feasibility of utilizing for radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs).