February 1, 2005 -- UMC and Ansoft Corp. have announced immediate availability of the first parameterized 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 HFSST, Ansoft DesignerT, and NexximT with UMC's CMOS process parameters.

The spiral inductor kit is built upon UMC's Electromagnetic Design Methodology (EMDM) -- which lets engineers 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 parameterized 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 Program. "Our collaboration with Ansoft allows our customers to design, simulate, and optimize spiral inductors on silicon substrates, relieving a major bottleneck of the RF CMOS design flow. Furthermore, we encouraged Ansoft to provide a path to back annotate to backend layout tools, making it very practical to innovate new designs and pass the results to standard layout tools."

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 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 recognized 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 utilize them directly in circuit and system simulation. EMDM makes it practical to synthesize entirely new inductors and rapidly back annotate this information into circuit schematics and standard layout tools."

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