High Q RF coils on silicon integrated circuits

We report on out-of-plane micro-machined inductors exhibiting record high quality factors (Q) on silicon integrated circuits. The coils are made by three-dimensional self-assembly of stress-engineered structures fabricated with standard semiconductor batch processing techniques. Coils fabricated on low resistance CMOS-compatible silicon exhibit quality factors of over 70 at 1 GHz. BiCMOS test oscillators utilizing these micro-machined coils show significant phase noise reduction over similar oscillators using conventional spiral coils.

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