Design of magnetic RF inductor in CMOS

Traditional planar inductors in Radio Frequency (RF) Integrated Circuits (ICs) are plagued by large areas, low quality, and low frequencies. This paper describes a magnetic-based CMOS-compatible RF inductor. Magnetic-core inductors with various ferrite-filled structures, spiral structures, and magnetic material permeabilities were simulated to show that this inductor greatly improves the inductance by up to 97% and quality factor by 18.6% over a multi-GHz frequency range. The results indicate that the inductor is a very promising and viable solution to realize miniature, high quality, and high frequency on-chip inductors for high-end RF ICs.