Abstract
With the rapid growing design of RF circuit and communication integrated circuit, researches in interconnects, on-chip spiral inductors, and transformers become more and more important. Traditionally, designers of on-chip spiral inductors and transformers almost extract S-parameter by measurement or electromagnetic simulation software tools. They then use S-parameters to analyze or convert S-parameters to RLGCK model. So we think it is important to provide a designer a convenient system of synthesis and analysis. This thesis also provides a GUI called AutoHenry to let users use the method easily and quickly. This is a tool which can synthesize interconnects, on-chip spiral inductors and on-chip transformers. AutoHenry also has a large number of simulations. AutoHenry can automatically produce output files which provide all RLGCK parameters. AutoHenry can construct interconnects, on-chip spiral inductors and on-chip transformers model, and it can also construct these devices for any process. AutoHenry can help designers to synthesize desirable on-chip spiral inductors and on-chip transformers. AutoHenry is more than two times faster than electromagnetic simulation software. Because AutoHenry can automatic simulation and a large number of sweeping, user can reduce the repeat design and save a lot of time.This thesis proposes frequency-domain and time-domain methods to analyze the on-chip passive device parameters as on-chip spiral inductors and transformers. The frequency-domain methods are S2-function and S4-function. S2-function can convert on-chip spiral inductors’s S-parameters to the RLGCK parameters of modeled circuitry, and S4-function uses on on-chip transformers. The RLGCK parameters can provide designers insight of the physical characteristic of devices and modeling. The time-domain methods provide designers a different way to get S-parameters by directly extracting time domain RLGCK parameters of the device, and then use HSPICE to output S-parameters. The accuracy of our methods can be accepted by a lot of experiments. We also find the lumped model of on-chip spiral inductors and transformers, which input HSPICE have enormous errors. The errors are larger at high frequency especially. So we propose using distributed model to simulate which are shown in Fig. 3-6 and Fig. 3-7. The Fig. 3-8 to Fig. 3-11 are shown that we must cut device model into one hundred segments and the results would be accurate, otherwise the error have between 15% and seventeen times. This thesis provides 2-port and 4-port results to prove our methods which can apply to 4-port passive devices. We use commercial electromagnetic simulation software as HFSS(3D), ADS(2.5D) and IE3D(2.5D) to compare and verify our methods. We find that converting S-parameters to device’s modeling parameters are not easy after extracting S-parameters by these simulation software tools. Moreover, these simulation software tools are not accurate for passive devices of small dimensions. Hence our methods and AutoHenry can provide designs to solve it.