Power Losses in RF Inductor of Ferrite-Free Closed-Loop Inductively-Coupled Low Pressure Mercury Lamps

RF inductor power losses of ferrite-free electrode-less low pressure mercury inductively-coupled discharges excited in closed-loop dielectric tube were studied. The modelling was made within the framework of low pressure inductive discharge transformer model for discharge lamps with tubes of 16, 25 and 38 mm inner diam. filled with the mixture of mercury vapour (7.5×10–3 mm Hg) and argon (0.1, 0.3 and 1.0 mm Hg) at RF frequencies of 1, 7; 3.4 and 5.1 MHz and plasma power of (25–500) W. Discharges were excited with the help of the induction coil of 3, 4 and 6 turns placed along the inner perimeter of the closed-loop tube. It was found that the dependence of coil power losses, Pcoil, on the discharge plasma power, Ppl, had the minimum while Pcoil decreased with RF frequency, tube diameter and coil number of turns. The modelling results were found in good qualitative agreement with the experimental data; quantitative discrepancies are believed to be due skin-effect and RF electric field radial inhomogeneity that were not included in discharge modelling.

INTEGRATED STACKED-SPIRAL RF INDUCTOR WITH NANOPOWDER MAGNETIC CORE

On-chip stacked-spiral radio-frequency (RF) inductor with vertical nanopowder-magnetic-core was proposed and implemented in standard 0.18 μm six-metal CMOS with a post-CMOS backend process module (i.e., CMOS+). To improve on the prior open-magnetic-circuit-loop structure and thus limited improvement at multi-GHz performance, the non-traditional concept shows vertical magnetic core forming a near closed magnetic loop. The ferrite nanoparticle-magnetic-core reduced magnetic loss to improve L-density to 9 GHz. Results show the proof-of-concept designs greatly increase the inductance, L, by up to 34% and the factor, Q, by 62% over a multi-GHz frequency range.

Design and Analysis of a MEMS Tunable Inductor Based on UV Lithography of SU-8

This paper reports the design of a tunable radio-frequency (RF) inductor and analyses the parameters that influence the quality factor (Q) of the inductor. In our paper we mainly discuss the influence of the thickness of the metal layer on the Q when other parameters are fixed. In order to achieve the high thickness, we use SU-8 as our photoresist instead of the traditional photoresist. Through the analysis, we calculate out the thickness of the metal layer is 23um when the Q reaches to maximum.