Product category:
Design and Development Software
News Release from: Ansoft Europe | Subject: UMC spiral inductor design kit
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial
Team on 03 February 2005
Design kit simulates custom inductor
geometries
UMC and Ansoft have developed the industry's first parameterised spiral inductor design kit based on full-wave simulation.
UMC and Ansoft have developed the industry's first parameterised spiral inductor design kit based on full-wave simulation The kit enables RFCMOS designers to create and simulate custom inductor geometries by directly linking Ansoft's HFSS, Ansoft Designer and Nexxim with UMC's CMOS process parameters
This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 8 Nov 2004 at 8.00am (UK)
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The spiral inductor kit is built on UMC's Electromagnetic Design Methodology (EMDM) - which allows engineers to easily and accurately create any RF structure - and gives designers the flexibility to innovate new geometries simply by editing parameters such as diameter, number of turns, width and spacing of traces from a dialog box in HFSS.
Included in the kit are ready-to-solve, fully parameterised, HFSS projects for circular, square, hexagonal and octagonal coils in the regular, stacked, transformer and balanced configurations with all vias and underpasses included.
"Spiral inductors with small form factors, high Q, and high self-resonant frequencies are highly desired to meet the need for greater portability, increased functionality and lower costs for today's consumer and military communication systems", said Dr Albert Yen, Manager of UMC's Mixed-mode and Radio Frequency Technology Programme.
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"Our collaboration with Ansoft allows our customers to design, simulate and optimise spiral inductors on silicon substrates, relieving a major bottleneck of the RFCMOS design flow".
"Furthermore, we encouraged Ansoft to provide a path to back annotate to back-end layout tools, making it very practical to innovate new designs and pass the results to standard layout tools".
"UMC continues to prove to be an excellent partner for Ansoft as it is taking a leadership position in terms of addressing RF designer requirements", said Dr Lawrence Williams, Director of Business Development at Ansoft.
"Early on, UMC recognised the advantages of offering accurate electrical models for on-chip passive components and worked with Ansoft to create a methodology to streamline the process of incorporating the additional accuracy provided directly in circuit simulation".
"Using EMDM along with the new spiral inductor design kit, customers can now compute the inductance and quality factor (Q) for spiral inductors, rapidly develop a custom library for their own requirements including proximity effects, and use them directly in circuit and system simulation".
"EMDM makes it practical to synthesise entirely new inductors and rapidly back annotate this information into circuit schematics and standard layout tools".
The UMC spiral design kit is currently available for the 0.15 and 0.18um RFCMOS process at no charge to UMC customers and can be accessed by contacting UMC sales representatives.
Individual spiral geometries have already been simulated and validated versus laboratory measurements.
Ansoft and UMC's teams in Taiwan simulated over 300 spiral geometries to ensure design kit accuracy.
UMC has designed a 2.4GHz low noise amplifier (LNA) circuit as a test case for RFIC design.
The purpose of the project is to validate the models and design flow.
The LNA layout was simulated using the new design kit spirals and full layout extraction was performed.
Proximity effects for closely spaced spirals and the associated mutual coupling and substrate coupling was calculated using HFSS and results for simulations with and without proximity effects have been reported at international trade events.
These results show that additional performance and design margin may be obtained using this modern EM-based RFIC design flow.
The release of the spiral inductor design kit is part of a larger collaboration between Ansoft and UMC to develop an EM-based design flow for RFCMOS circuits.
The flow is being validated by design and simulation of a direct-conversion ultra-wideband (UWB) radio.
The goal is to demonstrate radio design, simulation and fabrication using Ansoft best-in-class tools and UMC's foundry process.
Ansoft and UMC are designing, fabricating and testing the circuits.
The result of this effort will validate the EMDM design flow for high-performance radio circuits, validate UMC's process for UWB circuits and provide a reference design for UMC and Ansoft customers.
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