INTEGRATED MAGNETIC PASSIVE DEVICES

The integration of on-chip passive devices (e.g. inductors and transformers) with magnetic materials into silicon technology has been for decades a major challenge in the move towards monolithic solutions for wireless communications, RF integrated circuits, power delivery and management, and EMI noise reduction. Senior scientist Dr. Claudiu Valentin Falub explains how the LLS EVO II allows engineering of superior soft magnetic multilayers that ultimately led to ultra-low profile integrated magnetic solenoid micro-inductors with record inductance density and quality factor.

Thin-film integrated passive devices (IPD)

Integrated Passive Devices (IPDs) are attracting an increasing interest due to constant needs for lighter, smaller, faster, “smarter”, and more economical and sophisticated mobile devices. IPDs are multiple passive components sharing a substrate and a package, which can be designed as flip-chip mountable or wire bondable components, and are generally fabricated on silicon, silicon-on- insulator (SOI), GaAs, sapphire, or glass substrates using standard wafer fabrication technologies, such as thin film and photolithography processing. A variety of functional blocks, e.g. impedance matching circuits, harmonic filters, couplers and baluns, power combiner/divider, etc. can be realised by IPD technology (see Fig. 1).