144 IEEE ELECTRON DEVICE LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO.

3, MARCH 2004

Variable Inductance Multilayer Inductor With

MOSFET Switch Control
Piljae Park, Cheon Soo Kim, Member, IEEE, Mun Yang Park, Sung Do Kim, and Hyun Kyu Yu, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—A variable monolithic inductor having a stacked

spiral inductor connected with MOSFET switches is proposed
and fabricated in a 0.18 m, one-poly–six-metal (1P6M) standard
CMOS process. By controlling a voltage of the MOSFET switch,
the proposed three-stacked inductor demonstrates a continuously
variable inductance of from 8 to 23 nH at 2.4 GHz, and due to its
stacked structure, it takes less than 50% of the chip area compared
with conventional single layer inductors. With its compact size
and variable inductance feature, the proposed variable inductor
is a prospective key component for the multiband RF circuits
such as electrically controllable matching circuits and wide tuning
range voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs).
Index Terms—Inductors, multilayer spiral inductors, quality
factor, variable inductance.
Fig. 1. Configuration of (a) the proposed inductor, (b) its equivalent circuit,
and (c) its microphotograph.
I. INTRODUCTION
II. VARIABLE MULTILAYER INDUCTOR DESIGN
T O accommodate several wireless services within a single
chip transceiver, the implementation of radio frequency
(RF) circuits with the multiband feature would be a more at-
A voltage controlled monolithic variable inductor which con-
sists of a stacked spiral inductor and MOSFET switches is pro-
tractive way to reduce chip area and cost than the simple in- posed and fabricated in a 1P6M, 0.18 m standard CMOS tech-
tegration of each RF band circuit. Until recently, variable ca- nology. As shown in Fig. 1(a), three spiral inductors are stacked
pacitors using the voltage dependant junction or MOS capac- vertically using metal 6, metal 4, and metal 2 with two par-
itance have been widely used to implement voltage controlled allel-connected MOSFET switches (SW53, SW31). The under-
oscillators (VCOs). A monolithic variable inductor, however, is pass using metal 1 layer is located 0.85 m below the metal 2
hard to implement because the inductor metal line length must layer. Each square spiral inductor has a 2.5 turn with an inner
be changed electrically to alter the inductance. Two series-con- side length of 120 m, and a metal line width and space of 15
nected inductors with a MOSFET switch were employed by a and 1.5 m, respectively. Two MOSFET switches, which have a
low noise amplifier (LNA) [1] to control gain, and a VCO [2] channel length of 0.18 m and channel width of 10 m, are used
to widen the tuning range by short-circuiting one inductor using for the inductance variable operation. When SW53 and SW31
a switch. In these cases, however, chip area occupied by the in- are in the off state, the inductance is approximately a summa-
ductors was relatively very large because both series-connected tion of each inductors inductance, and when those two switches
inductors were placed separately. are in the on state, the inductance is that of one inductor.
Fortunately, the recent progress of multilayer metallization The area of a proposed three-stacked inductor
technologies makes multilayer stacked inductors (MSIs) fea- m is decreased 65% compared with that of seven-turn
sible with a comparable quality factor [3], [4]. In this letter, by conventional SLI m with the same inductance.
combining MSI and MOSFET switch, we proposed an area ef- For a proposed two-stacked one m having the
ficient monolithic inductor, which achieves a continuously vari- same inductance of a five-turn SLI m , the area
able inductance according to the control voltage of the MOSFET is decreased 50%.
switch.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
Two-port s-parameters of the proposed inductors were mea-
sured using an HP8510C network analyzer and de-embedded
Manuscript received October 3, 2003; revised November 18, 2003. The re-
view of this letter was arranged by Editor K. De Meyer.
to eliminate the pad parasitics. The inductance (L) and quality
The authors are with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research factor (Q) are defined as (1) and (2) [3]:
Institute (ETRI) Basic Research Laboratory, RF/Analog IC Design Team,
Daejeon 305–350, Korea (e-mail: pjpark@etri.re.kr; cskim@etri.re.kr; my-
park@etri.re.kr; sdkim@etri.re.kr; hkyu@etri.re.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LED.2003.822670
(1)

0741-3106/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE

PARK et al.: VARIABLE INDUCTANCE MULTILAYER INDUCTOR WITH MOSFET SWITCH CONTROL
Fig. 2. Frequency response of the proposed three-stacked inductor according
to switch control voltage and the response of the three-stacked inductor without
switches.
Fig. 3. Inductance versus MOSFET switch control voltage for the proposed
inductor at 2.4 GHz.
(2)
Fig. 2 shows the frequency response of the proposed three-
stacked inductor with switch control and the response of the
same structure inductor without a switch. When two switches
are in the off state, the three serially stacked spiral inductors
achieve maximum value of inductance, while both of them is in
the on state, only the top spiral inductor plays a role of inductor
that results in its minimum inductance. When the bias voltages
are controlled between the on and off states, the inductance can
be changed continuously from 23 to 8 nH at 2.4 GHz. The con-
tinuous inductance change according to the control voltage of
the MOSFET switches is depicted in Fig. 3. With a impedance
of the MOSFET switch, , as a function of control
voltage, , the equivalent circuit of the proposed inductor is
shown in Fig. 1(b). From the Fig. 1(b) the impedance of the pro-
posed inductor can be expressed as (3). When the switch is in the
on state V with low impedance, the parallel-con-
nected switch provides a short path for the RF signal instead of
145
Fig. 4. Frequency response of the proposed two-stacked inductor according
to switch control voltage and the response of the two-stacked inductor without
switch.
the relatively high impedance inductor path. As a result, the in-
ductance reaches its minimum, . As the MOSFET switch
impedance, V , increases, the imaginary part of the in-
ductor impedance increases approximately from to
as in (3). When the switch is in the off state with
high impedance, the main RF signal path is formed through each
inductor layer, which results in the maximum inductance
(3)
where, L is the inductance of each spiral inductor, V is
the impedance of the MOSFET switch as a function of control
voltage V .
Fig. 4 shows the frequency response of the proposed
two-stacked inductor and the response of the two-stacked
inductor without a switch. The two-stacked inductor uses
metal 6 and metal 3 for the inductor layer and metal 1 for
the underpass, which is located 2.23 m below metal 3. The
inductance of the proposed two-stacked inductor changes
continuously with the control voltage. However, compared with
the proposed three-stacked inductor, the proposed two-stacked
inductor shows less variation range of inductance and a higher
resonance frequency due to the less inductor layer and the
decreased intermetal layer capacitance respectively. The par-
asitic capacitance determines characteristics of the inductor
including resonance frequency. There are three major parasitic
capacitances in the multilayer stacked inductor: the intermetal
layer capacitance, the metal to substrate capacitance and the
metal to underpass capacitance. Among them the intermetal
layer capacitance is four times larger than that of the metal to
substrate [5]. Therefore, for the two-stacked inductor case, it is
expected that if metal 1 is used as the inductor layer instead of
metal 3, the resonance frequency will further increase due to
the decreased intermetal layer capacitance.
To analyze the effects of the parallel-connected MOSFET
switches on the proposed inductor, we compared the proposed
inductor with the same geometry inductor but without switches.
The resonance frequency of the proposed inductor decreased
from 3.9 to 3.6 GHz for the three-stacked inductor and from
6.8 to 6.4 GHz for the two-stacked inductor. The decreased res-
onance frequency is due to the increased parasitic capacitance,
146
Fig. 5. Quality factor comparison of the proposed inductor. (The single layer
inductor uses metal 6 for the inductor layer and metal 5 for the underpass located
1 m below).
originated from the MOSFET switches in the proposed inductor.
The inductance of the proposed one was 1–nH high because of
the additional metal line used for the switch connection. The
switches also affect the quality factor of the inductor. Fig. 5
shows the quality factor of the proposed three-stacked inductor
according to the control voltage and that of the three-stacked in-
ductor without switches. When switches were in the off state, the
proposed inductor achieved its maximum inductance, and the
quality factor decreased about 30% compared with that of the
three-stacked inductor without switches. The decreased quality
factor can be explained by substrate losses in the source/drain
to the substrate path, which is parallel to the inductor layer.
When the two switches (SW53, SW31) were in the on state, the
quality factor was degraded severely due to the on resistance of
the switch, which was serially connected to the inductor layer.
Fig. 5 also shows that the stacked inductor has a comparable
IEEE ELECTRON DEVICE LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 3, MARCH 2004
quality factor at a frequency above 1.5 GHz compared with that
of a conventional single-layer inductor.
IV. CONCLUSION
In this letter, we proposed a voltage controlled monolithic
variable inductor using stacked spiral inductors and MOSFET
switches. Because of its stacked structure, it takes less than
50% of a chip area compared to the conventional SLI with the
same inductance. The inductance of the three-stacked proposed
inductor can be changed from 8 to 23 nH at 2.4 GHz, and
for the two-stacked one from 3.7 to 15 nH by controlling
the MOSFET switch voltage. Because of the switches in the
proposed inductor, it shows a quality factor of 30% degradation
due to the losses in the switch, and less than a 10% decrease
of the self resonance frequency due to increased parasitic
capacitance. However, the proposed inductor shows a com-
pact size and comparable quality factor at a high frequency.
Furthermore, if more metal layers are used, the quality factor
of proposed inductor will be much improved. Therefore, the
proposed variable inductor is a promising key component for
electrically controllable multiband RF circuits, wide tuning
range VCOs, and matching circuits.
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