On-chip Spiral Inductors With Patterned Ground Shields For Si-based RF IC's

Abstract

This paper presents a novel on-chip inductor with a patterned ground shield inserted between the spiral inductor and the silicon substrate. Experimental results show that the ground shield effectively decouples the spiral inductor from the lossy silicon substrate. The new design improves the quality factor by 25% and reduces the substrate coupling between inductors up to 25 dB over those without the ground shields.