Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON MICROWAVE THEORY AND TECHNIQUES
Volume 57, Issue 9, Pages 2276-2283Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TMTT.2009.2027153
Keywords
Actuator; electrothermal; equivalent circuit; microelectromechanical systems (MEMS); tunable inductor
Categories
Funding
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Microelectromechanical Systems (MEMS)/Nanoelectromechanical Systems (NEMS)
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We propose a tunable microelectromechanical systems integrated inductor with a large-displacement electrothermal actuator. Based on a transformer configuration, the inductance of a spiral inductor is tuned by controlling the relative position of a magnetically coupled short-circuited loop. The magnetic coupling between the inductors can be changed from 0.17 to 0.8 through an electrothermal actuator that can change their relative position by over 140 mu m. For the first time, we investigate the impact of this tuning scheme on the inductance and quality factor and propose optimal designs. While a previous preliminary study has focused on keeping the ratio between the two coupled inductors close to one, we find that optimal performance is a weak function of this ratio. Instead, it primarily depends on the resistive loss of the short-circuited coil. Our theoretical studies are backed by a variety of fabricated and measured tunable inductors that show a similar to 2 : 1 inductance tuning ratio over a wide frequency range of approximately 25 GHz. In addition, the maximum and minimum quality factors of the tunable inductor are measured to be 26 and 10, respectively, which agree well with the theoretically expected values.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available