Design of a Novel High Q On-Chip Non-solenoid MEMS Inductor

In this paper, we proposed a novel non-solenoid structure to realize high Q on-chip inductor based on MEMS techniques. It aims to reduce the resistance loss by parallel turns while increase the inductance by the self-inductance of the inner and outer copper wire columns and the mutual inductance between the same flow directions. The inner and outer copper wire columns are spaced apart as much as possible without the reverse flow mutual inductance subtraction. Finite element method was applied to analyze the performance of the designed inductor. The novel inductor can significantly improve the Q value (peak Q= 39 @ 2.03 GHz) which nearly 180% higher than that of traditional 8-turns solenoid inductor, and nearly 450% higher than that of a planar spiral inductor at the same feature size. We also raised several solutions to solve the low inductance problem due to the parallel connection. In addition, the self-resonant frequency is greater than 15 GHz which makes our inductor adaptable to a wider spectrum of applications.