Custom Inductor design .13u Process

[jmoore180]

Hi. I would like to know if any one has experience making their own coil indicators (layout and models) for RFIC designs and how to go about it. I am trying to use inductive peeking for a CML receiver output and the minimum size of the inductors that come in the design kit are 100umx100um which is to large for my physical layout.
Thanks Jason

 

[dick_freebird]

From what I see, to do a decent job you'll be learning EM
solver tools and often you end up with a solution you did
not want - like for a digital I/O, do you really want a s2p
model like RF dudes (who do most inductor work) prefer?
And on the flip side, is a lumped element model (of arbitrary
lumpiness) going to do you any good?

And when you start caring about Q, you start caring about
the substrate and all that. People seem to make careers of
integrated inductor modeling.

I imagine that you might be able to find papers on 0.13um
inductors (from some while back when people cared about
0.13um technology and you could get published), and get
dimensions / SRF / Q info and so on. You'd likely have some
work left to do, to get anything that worked for time-domain
simulations, but maybe you will get lucky and find smaller
geometry examples.

On the other hand, small inductors are, well, small and may
simply not give you the value you want. If the value you
need is approaching the value of the "too big" inductor
then "too big" may be the end of the story.

Also, a bond wire can make a good enough inductor if
you happen to want single-nH-range, or can design
such that this works out OK. People do make use of
this "feature". You may not be doing a wirebond part,
of course.

 

[baenisch]

Hi there,

You might want to take a look into the Passive Component Designer from Cadence (available up to MMSIM7.11)
and/or a EM-Solver like Sonnet. Both Tools require technology information:
-sheet resistances
-epsilons
-layer thicknesses

As far as I can remember PCD reads the data from the assura techfile, for Sonnet you need to create your own
technology file (rather simple). While PCD directly computes solutions for a given inductor spec you need to draw
your own structures with Sonnet and simulate them, fix the layout, simulate them ...
PCD uses a set of equations to design inductors, but I would still recommend a post PCD EM simulation with Sonnet or
whatever other tool is out there to verify the output of PCD.
However given the little area you have available it's pretty unlikely that you will get good results.

Best Regards

Andi