Compact Wide-Band Modelling of Spiral Inductors for RFICs using Particle Swarm Optimization

The exponential growth in commercial wireless and wired communication market has given rise to considerable interest in low power, low noise and low cost radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC). Traditionally RFICs are fabricated using the expensive GaAs technologies for frequencies upto 40GHz. The development of deep sub micron CMOS technology processes allow silicon RFICs to compete with high-end GaAs in the newly proposed UltraWideBand (UWB) range from 1-10GHz. The low fabrication cost silicon CMOS process permits mixed signal RF components to integrate in a single chip i.e. “System on a Chip” (SoC). The problems associated with these silicon based RFICs is highly lossy substrates . Hence passives like inductor using Si-substrate have changing characteristics with frequency. The newly adopted methodology to reduce the problem is parasitic aware design which necessitates the need for accurate modeling and extraction of the parasitics associated with the ideal component. One of the most challenging problems of the silicon based RFIC designs is the lack of accurate model of On-Chip inductors suitable for circuit simulation.