LAUSR

For wideband frequency-agile radio frequency integrated circuits (RFIC), tunable components are essential. It has been a great challenge in RF electronics to utilize a magnetic tunable inductor for ultra wideband applications. This paper demonstrates an electrically tunable RF inductor encompassing a broad range of frequencies from 4 GHz to 20 GHz. This is achieved by integrating domain patterned permalloy with various thicknesses like 20 nm, 60 nm and 92 nm. There is a performance boost of the inductor and also tunable inductor is achieved by applying DC current. Experimental results show that amongst all the permalloy patterns, 11 m x 13 m provides the highest inductance tunability of 15.8% at 20 GHz for 60 nm patterns, 10.8% at 15.1 GHz for 92 nm and 4.3% at 15.7 GHz for 20 nm. This is the highest inductance tunability obtained so far for spiral inductors integrated with 60 nm permalloy patterns using the dc bias method. The 15.8%, 10.8% and 4.3% inductance tunability provides 8%, 5.7% and 2.1% frequency tuning correspondingly.