Design and Simulation of RF MEMS Tunable Spiral Inductor

This paper presents a tunable inductor using MEMS technology .This tunable spiral inductor is designed in order to be used in RF circuits such as : controlled oscillators with voltage (VCO) , matching networks ,amplifiers etc . The electrostatic method is employed for tuning the inductor by the movement of cantilever beam downward and changing the value of magnetic flux. Value of inductance varies fram 1.15nh to 0.561 nh .therefore ,tunablity of 66.21% was achieved .Maximum quality factor in the above inductor was achieved az 13.88 in the frequency 0f 12 GHz and the value of resonance frequency was achieved as 19.5 GHz

[1]  Kenichi Okada,et al.  Wide Tuning Range LC-VCO Using Variable Inductor for Reconfigurable RF Circuit , 2005, IEICE Trans. Fundam. Electron. Commun. Comput. Sci..

[2]  V. Lubecke,et al.  Self-assembling MEMS variable and fixed RF inductors , 2000, 2000 Asia-Pacific Microwave Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.00TH8522).

[3]  N. Tien.  Tunable RF MEMS elements , 2004, Proceedings. 7th International Conference on Solid-State and Integrated Circuits Technology, 2004..

[4]  Jun-Bo Yoon,et al.  Monolithic high-Q overhang inductors fabricated on silicon and glass substrates , 1999, International Electron Devices Meeting 1999. Technical Digest (Cat. No.99CH36318).

[5]  S. Sivoththaman,et al.  A Tunable RF MEMS Inductor on Silicon Incorporating an Amorphous Silicon Bimorph in a Low-Temperature Process , 2006, IEEE Electron Device Letters.

[6]  Hongrui Jiang,et al.  On-chip spiral inductors suspended over deep copper-lined cavities , 2000 .

[7]  V. M. Lubecke,et al.  Self-assembling MEMS variable and fixed RF inductors , 2001 .