A modular approach for high Q microwave CMOS active inductor design

In this paper, a modular approach for the L-band CMOS Active Inductor (AI) is proposed and designed based upon a connection in series of conventional low Q-factor gyrator-C basic cells. The Q-factor can then be tuned by the number of AI cells in order to offer simplicity in terms of pole/zero cancellation, while maintaining in each gyrator-C inductor cell low values of Q. In order to demonstrate the proposed architecture's usefulness, a prototype L-band active inductor is designed in a 0.6 /spl mu/m CMOS process. The simulated results show that a high Q value of 972 is obtained at 2 GHz and an average Q-factor value of 200 is also achieved in the frequency range of 1-2 GHz.