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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS 1

A Scalable, Broadband, and Physics-Based Model for On-Chip

Rectangular Spiral Inductors
Sathya Sree Jayaraman 1, Venkata Vanukuru 2, Deleep Nair1 , and Anjan Chakravorty 1

1 Department of Electrical Engineering, IIT Madras, Chennai 600036, India

2 GLOBALFOUNDRIES, Bengaluru 560045, India

A scalable, broadband, and physics-based compact model for on-chip spiral inductors with rectangular outline shape is
demonstrated for the first time in this paper. A simple dc inductance model is developed based on the current sheet approximation.
The reduction in inductance due to the flow of eddy current in a back metal plate is considered using the method of images. A three-
ladder network is shown to be sufficient to accurately model skin effect caused due to the magnetic field setup at high frequencies.
Geometry-dependent expression suitable for rectangular cross-sectional metal strips is presented to predict the proximity effect.
Physics-based expression for the substrate capacitance is derived. The proposed model is also shown to have a good correlation in
the presence of a patterned ground shield. The proposed model is verified across CMOS process parameters that affect the inductor
performance, such as metal thickness, substrate resistivity, and substrate thickness. Furthermore, model accuracy is also validated
across design parameters such as spiral width, spacing between turns, number of turns, and diameter. The model is shown to have
a good agreement with both EM simulations and measurements.
Index Terms— CMOS, patterned ground shield (PGS), proximity effect, quality factor, radio frequency integrated circuits,
rectangular spiral, skin effect, spiral inductor.

I. I NTRODUCTION and proximity effects for complex structures such as multi-

T HE performances of several RF front-end blocks depend
heavily on the quality of integrated spiral inductors.
Spiral shapes with a square outline are usually optimal from
quality factor (Q) stand point. However, a rectangular spiral
outline shape [1] allows flexibility to the designer while doing
layout floor planning at the circuit level. Thus, the design and
modeling of rectangular spiral inductors are of great interest
to the circuit designers.
Starting from the classical work done by Grover [2], several
works described closed-form expressions for dc inductance.
The works discussed in [3] and [4] developed an expression
for dc inductance applicable for all geometries; however,
finding the self and mutual inductances in a spiral with several
number of turns would be cumbersome because of its lengthy
procedure. Based on [3], a simpler method using the concept
of average segment interaction is proposed in [5]. In [6],
an empirical relationship is presented for square and circular
geometries. Also, in [7], a methodology to find the dc induc-
tance for square outline geometries is proposed. To the best
of our knowledge, similar studies do not exist for rectangular
spiral inductors.
Three main mechanisms that influence the performance
of on-chip inductors are: 1) skin and proximity effects;
2) capacitive coupling through the dielectric; and 3) electric
and magnetic field penetration into the substrate. All these
phenomena should be taken into account to obtain a broadband
compact model for on-chip spiral inductors. Modeling of skin
Manuscript received April 25, 2018; revised April 18, 2019;
accepted May 6, 2019. Corresponding author: S. Jeyaraman (e-mail:
ee13d048@ee.iitm.ac.in).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TMAG.2019.2916501
0018-9464 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
strand inductors and litz wires is demonstrated in [8] and [9].
However, modeling of skin effect for planar inductors using
four ladder circuits is reported in [10] and [11]. We found that
four-ladder circuits are not needed for the inductors having low
dc resistance; instead, a three-ladder circuit proves to be suf-
ficient. In [11], proximity effect is modeled for inductors with
a circular cross section. We propose suitable modifications to
develop a model for rectangular geometries. In [12], substrate
capacitance is modeled by using the parameter extraction
methodology, whereas in [13] by using frequency-dependent
expression. Compared to the existing literature, this paper
advances the state of the art with the following improvements
with respect to rectangular on-chip spiral inductors.
1) DC inductance formulation including the effect of the
back metal plate.
2) Skin effect modeling using three-ladder circuits.
3) Proximity effect modeling based on geometry
parameters.
4) Physics-based substrate modeling.
5) Model formulation in the presence of a patterned ground
shield (PGS).
Equivalent-circuit model formulations for rectangular spiral
along with their verification with EM simulated data are
described in Section II. Section III presents comparative results
with experimental data followed by a conclusion in Section IV.
II. M ODEL F ORMULATIONS AND V ERIFICATIONS
A. DC Inductance
Fig. 1(a) shows the top view of a rectangular spiral inductor.
To calculate the dc inductance of this spiral, we make use
of the current sheet approximation [Fig. 1(b)] following [14].
The dc inductance expression of a trapezoid with zero metal
thickness (as given in [7]) is modified here to account for the
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2 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS

Fig. 1. (a) Top view of a rectangular spiral inductor and (b) corresponding
view using current sheet approximation.

Fig. 3. Image inductor at a distance 2(tox + tsub ) from the real inductor.
The arrow shows the direction of current flow. tox and tsub are the thickness
of the oxide and substrate, respectively.

trapezoids can be found using

 
Dout,x + Din,x
Mx = M , GMD y
2
Fig. 2. Illustration of mutual inductance between x-directional trapezoids.  
Dout,x − Din,x
−M , GMD y . (4)
2
finite-metal thickness (t) following [2] as
  GMD y can be calculated using (3) with D replaced by Davg,y

μn 2 Davg,x 2Davg,x identified as the average distance between the x-directional
L self,x = ln + 0.5 trapezoids in y-direction (Fig. 2). Similarly, the self-inductance
2π u+t
    of y-directional trapezoid, L self,y , and the mutual inductance
u +t u +t 2 between the opposite y-directional trapezoids, M y , can be
+ 0.178 +0.0416
Davg,x Davg,x calculated using the formulations from (1)–(4) by interchang-
(1) ing the subscripts x and y. Finally, the dc inductance of the
rectangular spiral inductor can be calculated as
where L self,x is the self-inductance of the x-directional trape-
zoid, Davg,x = (Dout,x +Din,x )/2, n is the number of turns, and L dc = 2(L self,x + L self,y − Mx − M y ). (5)
μ (= μ0 μr , μ0 = 4π × 10−7 H /m, μr = 1) is the magnetic
The reduction in inductance due to the effect of a back metal
permeability of the medium [4]. The width of the total current
plate is discussed in [15]. Here, to account for the reduction
sheet u is obtained as u = nw+(n−1)s, where s is the spacing
in inductance, an image spiral is assumed to be present at a
between metal trace and w is the metal width. Unlike the
distance of twice the thickness of oxide and substrate from the
work in [7], here we propose a strategy to calculate the mutual
real spiral as shown in Fig. 3. Finally, the total dc inductance
inductance between two trapezoids when their length and the
including the effect of back metal plate is calculated as
separation between them are not equal. This will effectively
help us obtaining dc inductance of a rectangular spiral. The L dc,total = L dc + 2(−Msub-,x − Msub-,y + Msub+,x + Msub+,y )
mutual inductance between the opposite x-directional trape-
(6)
zoids can be calculated as the difference in mutual inductance
between two pair of rectangles, as illustrated in Fig. 2, where where L dc is given in (5), and Msub-,x and Msub+,x (Msub-,y
Davg,y = (Dout,y + Din,y )/2. The mutual inductance between and Msub+,y ) are the negative and positive mutual induc-
two rectangular sheets of equal length (l) can be calculated tances between the real and image spiral segments, respec-
following [2] as tively, in the x(y)-direction. Msub-,x and Msub+,x can be
⎡ ⎛
⎞ obtained using (4) by replacing GMD y with 2tsub and
μn 2l l l2  1
M(l, GMD) = ⎣ln ⎝ + 1+ ⎠ (2tt )2 + Davg,y
2 /2, respectively (see Fig. 3). Similarly,
2π GMD GMD2 Msub+,y and Msub-,y can be obtained from (4) by interchanging

⎤ the subscripts x and y. If the distance between the trapezoids
GMD2 GMD ⎦ (2tt ) is very much less compared to the length of the trapezoid,
− 1+ + (2)
l2 l then GMD y in (4) can be replaced with the GMDz between
the two lines lying in different planes as [16]
with the geometric mean distance (GMD) given as    
  2 ln
4tsub (2tsub ) ln u 2 + 4tsub
2
4tt2
u2 u4 u6 GMDz = exp + 1 −
GMD = exp ln(D) − − − (3) u2 2 u2
12D 2 60D 4 168D 6 
4tsub u 3
where D is the distance between the rectangular current + tan−1 − . (7)
sheets. Therefore, the mutual inductance between x-directional u 2tsub 2
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SATHYA SREE et al.: SCALABLE, BROADBAND, AND PHYSICS-BASED MODEL FOR ON-CHIP RECTANGULAR SPIRAL INDUCTORS 3

Fig. 4. (a) DC inductance as a function of metal width : comparison of our

model (5) with the EM simulated results (Dout,x = 150 μm, Dout,y = 250 μm,
and s = 4 μm). (b) DC inductance as a function of substrate thickness:
comparison of our model (6) with the EM simulated results.

TABLE I
D IMENSIONS FOR THE I NVESTIGATED T EST S TRUCTURES

Fig. 5. Equivalent circuit for modeling skin and proximity effects.

inductance (L int ) yields

 2  2
To validate the dc inductance model (6), we simulated 1 L int 1 1 1 1
= 1+ + 2 − 2 1+ 2 (10)
several inductor structures using a full-wave EM simulator. L L1 R R R R
Different combinations of spiral width and turns are used to
check the model scalability as shown in Fig. 4(a). An excellent where L int is given in [17] and L 1 is obtained using
agreement is observed between our model and EM simulated L int R1
data. Fig. 4(b) shows the variation of dc inductance including =x . (11)
L1 Rdc
the substrate thickness effects obtained using our model (6).
The value of the fitting parameter, x, should be such that
We observed that our model predicts the dc inductance accu-
the condition L int /L 1 > 1 is satisfied and its value can be
rately for layouts #2, #3, and #4 given in Table I with different
further increased to get the optimum fit. Once  L is obtained
substrate thickness values and a back side metal. Note that the
from (10), L 2 can be obtained using (8). At higher frequencies,
test structures listed in Table I are chosen to validate all our
flux interacts with the nearby traces. The term d in Fig. 5
model formulations presented in this paper with both measured
represents a ratio that signifies to what extent the total flux
and EM simulated data.
penetrates at high frequencies and it is calculated for circular
geometry in [11]. The inductance of a metal strip with rec-
B. Skin and Proximity Effects tangular cross section is calculated from the inductance of a
metal strip with circular cross section by replacing the radius
The skin effect is modeled in [10] and [11] using a four- with the GMD of the sum of metal width and thickness [16].
ladder circuit. Here, we found that the three-ladder circuit Therefore, the radius in [11] can be replaced by the GMD of
as shown in Fig.5 is sufficient enough to model skin effect the sum of metal width and thickness which gives
for inductors with low dc resistance. It is assumed that the

 
resistance and inductance in the ladder circuit change in a 1 −1 2 (0.2235 (w + t)) 2
constant ratio, such that [11] d ≈ sin 1− . (12)
π w+s
Ri L1 To show the accuracy of the three-ladder circuit, the resistance
Ri+1 = , i = 1, 2 and L 2 = (8)
R L of all the layouts listed in Table I is plotted in Fig. 6. It proves
that the three-ladder circuit captures the resistive nature of
where the constants  R (> 1) and  L (< 1) for a three-ladder
the spiral inductor accurately over a wide range of frequency.
circuit have to be determined.  R is obtained by solving
To ensure scalability, our model is tested for various metal
  widths, spacings, and thicknesses. Fig. 7 shows that our model
R1
R + R + 1 −
2
=0 (9) predicts skin and proximity effects accurately for various width
Rdc
and spacing.
with Rdc as the dc resistance of the metal strip and R1 as Increasing the spiral thickness reduces the dc resistance,
the resistance at the maximum operating frequency. Equating thereby increasing the quality factor (Q) at lower frequencies.
the low-frequency inductance of the circuit to the internal However, due to accentuated proximity effect losses, resistance
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4 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS

Fig. 6. Frequency-dependent variation of resistance for various layouts.

Fig. 9. Equivalent circuit of on-chip spiral inductor. R p is the resistance of

the underpass. The dashed rectangular box shows the modeling of skin and
proximity effect, as shown in Fig. 5.

expressions proposed in [18]. Now, we propose formulations

to calculate Csub using the method of images. Consider two
rectangular plates separated by the distance of 2tt as shown
in Fig. 3. The two plates are charged equally in magnitude but
of opposite polarity. The charge density (ρ) is assumed to be
constant. Considering tox < tsub , the electric field due to these
rectangular plates in the z-direction is given by
ρ
Fig. 7. Variation in resistance for various metal width (w) and spacing (s) E1 = [tan−1 f (z) + tan−1 f (2tsub − z)] (13)
(Dout,x = 200 μm, Dout,y = 250 μm, and n = 4). πsub
where
Dout,x Dout,y
f (z) =  
2

2
2 . (14)
Dout,x 2 D
z 2 + out,y 2 + z2

The voltage drop in the substrate is given by

 tsub
V1 = E 1 dz
0
 tsub
ρ
= [tan−1 f (z) + tan−1 f (2tsub − z)]dz.
πsub 0
(15)

Applying a change of variable in the second term in (15)

Fig. 8. Variation in quality factor for layout #3 for various metal thicknesses.
V1

ρ 2tsub
increases steeply with frequency in spirals with thicker metals, = tan−1 f (z)dz
thereby limiting the Q values. Our model captures this phe- πsub
⎡0 ⎛ √ √
nomenon (for spiral thickness values ranging from 2 to 8 μm), tanh−1 √ 2√b+z
2

ρ ⎢ √ ⎜ b− b2 −4a 2
as shown in Fig. 8. = ⎣− 2a ⎝  √
πsub b − b2 − 4a 2
C. Oxide and Substrate Elements √ √ ⎞ ⎤2tt
tanh−1 √ 2√b+z  
2
Fig. 9 shows the equivalent circuit of the on-chip spiral b+ b −4a ⎟
2 2
−1 a ⎥
inductor including the substrate effects. The displacement +  √ ⎠ +z tan √ ⎦
2
b + b − 4a
2 2 z b+z
current in the oxide is modeled using Cox and C p is the 0
underpass capacitance. Cox and C p can be calculated using the (16)
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SATHYA SREE et al.: SCALABLE, BROADBAND, AND PHYSICS-BASED MODEL FOR ON-CHIP RECTANGULAR SPIRAL INDUCTORS 5

Fig. 10. Variation in quality factor for layouts as displayed in Table I. Fig. 12. Variation in quality factor for layout #4 with and without PGS.
TABLE II
VALID R ANGE OF G EOMETRIC AND P ROCESS PARAMETERS

Fig. 11. Equivalent circuit of on-chip inductor with PGS. Cild’ is the
capacitance between the underpass and the shield. The dashed rectangular
box shows the modeling of skin and proximity effect as shown in Fig. 5.

where a = Dout,x Dout,y /4 and b = (Dout,x /2)2 + (Dout,y /2)2 .

After substituting the limits, we get the capacitance C1 as Fig. 13. Chip image for layout #2.

Q ρ Dout,x Dout,y
C1 = = (17) This can be modeled by using a resistance, Rpgs = ρs l/wpgs ,
V1 V1 where ρs is the sheet resistance of the PGS and wpgs is the
yielding width of the fingers in PGS. Fig. 12 shows the comparison
of our model (Fig. 11) for PGS with EM simulated data.
Csub = C1 − C2 (18) It also compares the quality factor for layout #4 with substrate
where C2 is calculated using the above-mentioned procedure resistivity of 1000 and 20 ·cm without PGS. The broadband
for the inner rectangular plate shown in Fig. 3 with dimensions nature of the quality factor is accurately modeled. Use of
Din,x and Din,y . Finally, Rsub can be calculated using the PGS increases the capacitive coupling which reduces the
relation self-resonant frequency (SRF). Our model accurately predicts
sub the SRF.
Rsub = . (19)
σsub Csub
III. C OMPARISON W ITH M EASUREMENTS
Fig. 10 shows the variation of quality factor for all the layouts
listed in Table I. A good agreement is observed between the The process and geometric parameters over which our
model and EM simulated data. model is valid are listed in Table II. To validate the accuracy
of our model, we fabricated a set of inductors as mentioned
in Table I. The chosen test structures have a wide range of
D. Patterned Ground Shield inductance densities and also have low-to-high L dc values
Fig. 11 shows the equivalent circuit of the on-chip induc- at different frequency bands. A 0.13 μm BiCMOS technol-
tor using PGS [19], [20]. The capacitance between the top ogy [21], [22] using a single thick metal is used for hardware
metal and the shield can be obtained using [18] with length validation. The top metal is 4 μm thick aluminum and the
as n cr wpgs , where n cr is the number of crossovers and wpgs is bottom metal (used for underpass connection) is 1.4 μm thick
the width of the fingers in PGS. The displacement current aluminum with a 4 μm silicon dioxide inter-layer dielectric.
flows through a smaller distance before it reaches the ground. The bottom metal is almost 6 μm away from the substrate.
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6 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MAGNETICS
Fig. 14. Comparison of measured, EM simulated, and model data for layout #2. (a) Inductance. (b) Resistance. (c) Quality factor.
Substrate contacts or metal lines are not placed near these
inductor test structures to limit the electric and magnetic
coupling. On-wafer characterization is carried out using an
Agilent 8361A network analyzer while the pad parasitics are
de-embedded using the open-short standard. Fig. 13 shows the
chip image of layout #2. Fig. 14 shows a good match between
the experimental data, EM simulated, and model data, thereby
validating the studies made in Section II.
IV. C ONCLUSION
A physics-based compact model for on-chip rectangular
spiral inductors is presented. Our model is limited to the
substrate with high resistivity. Closed-form expressions are
derived for the frequency-independent RLC elements of the
model from the process and layout parameters. Scalability,
broadband nature, and accuracy of the proposed model are
validated using EM simulations and measurements across
process and layout parameters.
V. ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors would like to thank A. Beganovic and J. Rascoe
of GLOBALFOUNDRIES for the support with measurements.
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