Stacked inductors and transformers in CMOS technology

Abstract

A modification of stacked spiral inductors increases the self-resonance frequency by 100% with no additional processing steps, yielding values of 5 to 266 nH and self-resonance frequencies of 11.2 to 0.5 GHz. Closed-form expressions predicting the self-resonance frequency with less than 5% error have also been developed. Stacked transformers are also introduced that achieve voltage gains of 1.8 to 3 at multigigahertz frequencies. The structures have been fabricated in standard digital CMOS technologies with four and five metal layers.