144

IEEE ELECTRON DEVICE LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 3, MARCH 2004

Variable Inductance Multilayer Inductor With

MOSFET Switch Control
Piljae Park, Cheon Soo Kim, Member, IEEE, Mun Yang Park, Sung Do Kim, and Hyun Kyu Yu, Senior Member, IEEE

AbstractA variable monolithic inductor having a stacked

spiral inductor connected with MOSFET switches is proposed
and fabricated in a 0.18 m, one-polysix-metal (1P6M) standard
CMOS process. By controlling a voltage of the MOSFET switch,
the proposed three-stacked inductor demonstrates a continuously
variable inductance of from 8 to 23 nH at 2.4 GHz, and due to its
stacked structure, it takes less than 50% of the chip area compared
with conventional single layer inductors. With its compact size
and variable inductance feature, the proposed variable inductor
is a prospective key component for the multiband RF circuits
such as electrically controllable matching circuits and wide tuning
range voltage controlled oscillators (VCOs).
Index TermsInductors, multilayer spiral inductors, quality
factor, variable inductance.
Fig. 1. Configuration of (a) the proposed inductor, (b) its equivalent circuit,
and (c) its microphotograph.

I. INTRODUCTION

O accommodate several wireless services within a single

chip transceiver, the implementation of radio frequency
(RF) circuits with the multiband feature would be a more attractive way to reduce chip area and cost than the simple integration of each RF band circuit. Until recently, variable capacitors using the voltage dependant junction or MOS capacitance have been widely used to implement voltage controlled
oscillators (VCOs). A monolithic variable inductor, however, is
hard to implement because the inductor metal line length must
be changed electrically to alter the inductance. Two series-connected inductors with a MOSFET switch were employed by a
low noise amplifier (LNA) [1] to control gain, and a VCO [2]
to widen the tuning range by short-circuiting one inductor using
a switch. In these cases, however, chip area occupied by the inductors was relatively very large because both series-connected
inductors were placed separately.
Fortunately, the recent progress of multilayer metallization
technologies makes multilayer stacked inductors (MSIs) feasible with a comparable quality factor [3], [4]. In this letter, by
combining MSI and MOSFET switch, we proposed an area efficient monolithic inductor, which achieves a continuously variable inductance according to the control voltage of the MOSFET
switch.

II. VARIABLE MULTILAYER INDUCTOR DESIGN

A voltage controlled monolithic variable inductor which consists of a stacked spiral inductor and MOSFET switches is proposed and fabricated in a 1P6M, 0.18 m standard CMOS technology. As shown in Fig. 1(a), three spiral inductors are stacked
vertically using metal 6, metal 4, and metal 2 with two parallel-connected MOSFET switches (SW53, SW31). The underpass using metal 1 layer is located 0.85 m below the metal 2
layer. Each square spiral inductor has a 2.5 turn with an inner
side length of 120 m, and a metal line width and space of 15
and 1.5 m, respectively. Two MOSFET switches, which have a
channel length of 0.18 m and channel width of 10 m, are used
for the inductance variable operation. When SW53 and SW31
are in the off state, the inductance is approximately a summation of each inductors inductance, and when those two switches
are in the on state, the inductance is that of one inductor.
The area of a proposed three-stacked inductor
m is decreased 65% compared with that of seven-turn
m with the same inductance.
conventional SLI
For a proposed two-stacked one
m having the
m , the area
same inductance of a five-turn SLI
is decreased 50%.
III. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

Manuscript received October 3, 2003; revised November 18, 2003. The review of this letter was arranged by Editor K. De Meyer.
The authors are with the Electronics and Telecommunications Research
Institute (ETRI) Basic Research Laboratory, RF/Analog IC Design Team,
Daejeon 305350, Korea (e-mail: pjpark@etri.re.kr; cskim@etri.re.kr; mypark@etri.re.kr; sdkim@etri.re.kr; hkyu@etri.re.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LED.2003.822670

Two-port s-parameters of the proposed inductors were measured using an HP8510C network analyzer and de-embedded
to eliminate the pad parasitics. The inductance (L) and quality
factor (Q) are defined as (1) and (2) [3]:

0741-3106/04$20.00 2004 IEEE

(1)

PARK et al.: VARIABLE INDUCTANCE MULTILAYER INDUCTOR WITH MOSFET SWITCH CONTROL

145

Fig. 4. Frequency response of the proposed two-stacked inductor according

to switch control voltage and the response of the two-stacked inductor without
switch.
Fig. 2. Frequency response of the proposed three-stacked inductor according
to switch control voltage and the response of the three-stacked inductor without
switches.

the relatively high impedance inductor path. As a result, the in. As the MOSFET switch
ductance reaches its minimum,
impedance,
V
, increases, the imaginary part of the into
ductor impedance increases approximately from
as in (3). When the switch is in the off state
with
high impedance, the main RF signal path is formed through each
inductor layer, which results in the maximum inductance
(3)

Fig. 3. Inductance versus MOSFET switch control voltage for the proposed
inductor at 2.4 GHz.

(2)
Fig. 2 shows the frequency response of the proposed threestacked inductor with switch control and the response of the
same structure inductor without a switch. When two switches
are in the off state, the three serially stacked spiral inductors
achieve maximum value of inductance, while both of them is in
the on state, only the top spiral inductor plays a role of inductor
that results in its minimum inductance. When the bias voltages
are controlled between the on and off states, the inductance can
be changed continuously from 23 to 8 nH at 2.4 GHz. The continuous inductance change according to the control voltage of
the MOSFET switches is depicted in Fig. 3. With a impedance
, as a function of control
of the MOSFET switch,
voltage,
, the equivalent circuit of the proposed inductor is
shown in Fig. 1(b). From the Fig. 1(b) the impedance of the proposed inductor can be expressed as (3). When the switch is in the
V with low impedance, the parallel-conon state
nected switch provides a short path for the RF signal instead of

where, L is the inductance of each spiral inductor,

V
is
the impedance of the MOSFET switch as a function of control
voltage V .
Fig. 4 shows the frequency response of the proposed
two-stacked inductor and the response of the two-stacked
inductor without a switch. The two-stacked inductor uses
metal 6 and metal 3 for the inductor layer and metal 1 for
the underpass, which is located 2.23 m below metal 3. The
inductance of the proposed two-stacked inductor changes
continuously with the control voltage. However, compared with
the proposed three-stacked inductor, the proposed two-stacked
inductor shows less variation range of inductance and a higher
resonance frequency due to the less inductor layer and the
decreased intermetal layer capacitance respectively. The parasitic capacitance determines characteristics of the inductor
including resonance frequency. There are three major parasitic
capacitances in the multilayer stacked inductor: the intermetal
layer capacitance, the metal to substrate capacitance and the
metal to underpass capacitance. Among them the intermetal
layer capacitance is four times larger than that of the metal to
substrate [5]. Therefore, for the two-stacked inductor case, it is
expected that if metal 1 is used as the inductor layer instead of
metal 3, the resonance frequency will further increase due to
the decreased intermetal layer capacitance.
To analyze the effects of the parallel-connected MOSFET
switches on the proposed inductor, we compared the proposed
inductor with the same geometry inductor but without switches.
The resonance frequency of the proposed inductor decreased
from 3.9 to 3.6 GHz for the three-stacked inductor and from
6.8 to 6.4 GHz for the two-stacked inductor. The decreased resonance frequency is due to the increased parasitic capacitance,

146

IEEE ELECTRON DEVICE LETTERS, VOL. 25, NO. 3, MARCH 2004

quality factor at a frequency above 1.5 GHz compared with that

of a conventional single-layer inductor.
IV. CONCLUSION

Fig. 5. Quality factor comparison of the proposed inductor. (The single layer
inductor uses metal 6 for the inductor layer and metal 5 for the underpass located
1 m below).

originated from the MOSFET switches in the proposed inductor.

The inductance of the proposed one was 1nH high because of
the additional metal line used for the switch connection. The
switches also affect the quality factor of the inductor. Fig. 5
shows the quality factor of the proposed three-stacked inductor
according to the control voltage and that of the three-stacked inductor without switches. When switches were in the off state, the
proposed inductor achieved its maximum inductance, and the
quality factor decreased about 30% compared with that of the
three-stacked inductor without switches. The decreased quality
factor can be explained by substrate losses in the source/drain
to the substrate path, which is parallel to the inductor layer.
When the two switches (SW53, SW31) were in the on state, the
quality factor was degraded severely due to the on resistance of
the switch, which was serially connected to the inductor layer.
Fig. 5 also shows that the stacked inductor has a comparable

In this letter, we proposed a voltage controlled monolithic

variable inductor using stacked spiral inductors and MOSFET
switches. Because of its stacked structure, it takes less than
50% of a chip area compared to the conventional SLI with the
same inductance. The inductance of the three-stacked proposed
inductor can be changed from 8 to 23 nH at 2.4 GHz, and
for the two-stacked one from 3.7 to 15 nH by controlling
the MOSFET switch voltage. Because of the switches in the
proposed inductor, it shows a quality factor of 30% degradation
due to the losses in the switch, and less than a 10% decrease
of the self resonance frequency due to increased parasitic
capacitance. However, the proposed inductor shows a compact size and comparable quality factor at a high frequency.
Furthermore, if more metal layers are used, the quality factor
of proposed inductor will be much improved. Therefore, the
proposed variable inductor is a promising key component for
electrically controllable multiband RF circuits, wide tuning
range VCOs, and matching circuits.
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