Design and characterization of levitated suspended RF inductors

This paper presents a design of novel on-chip micromachined spiral inductors developed in 0.8 mu m commercial CMOS technology. Proposed innovative architecture maximizes the quality factor Q. Suspended inductors can be placed vertically above the substrate, thus, the parasitic substrate effects are considerably reduced. Four designed passive inductors have values from 1 nH to 7 nH. The Q-factor greater than ten is estimated from calculations, and is experimentally verified by S-parameter measurements