Performance Analysis and Simulation of Spiral and Active Inductor in 90nm CMOS Technology

Abstract

This paper presents compendium analysis, simulation and comparison of conventional spiral/passive inductor and active inductor in 90nm CMOS process. Spiral inductor is a passive element, a coil of wire, follows several drawbacks regarding silicon area consumption, quality factor, and inductance. However, an innovative approach which replicates the behaviors exhibited by the spiral inductor with some additional key features is active inductor. This research paper narrates several comparative features which define the figure of merit and recapitulates the findings based on established references models and proper simulations. Considering the drawbacks such as greater silicon area consumption, low and fixed inductance and quality factor shown by spiral inductor, the active inductor outdoes the spiral inductor. The simulation results demonstrate how the inductance can be made tunable by the regulating parameters such as capacitance, transconductance of the implemented transconductor which also pave the way to tune the quality factor. Nonetheless, active inductor has two major drawbacks regarding phase noise and dc power consumption aided by active elements used in this topology. After all, for the purpose of application based implementations of active inductor, some basic performance parameters and controlling parameters that affect the performance parameters have been summarized.