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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

Suspended Spiral Inductor and Band-Pass Filter

on Thick Anodized Aluminum Oxide
Jong-Min Yook, Kyoung-Min Kim, and Young-Se Kwon, Member, IEEE

AbstractWe make suspended inductors and 2.45 GHz BPFs on

the selectively anodized aluminum. The thick anodized alumina is
used as the supporting dielectric and it is easily removed by using
chemical wet-etching. The thickness of anodized alumina is 80 m
and the depth of the total air-cavity is 200 m. The fabricated inductor over an air cavity has a 25% greater Q factor and 21%
higher inductance at 2 GHz compared to an inductor on anodized
aluminum. The 2.45 GHz BPF adjusting the suspended inductors
has 2.8 dB of insertion loss with a narrow bandwidth.
Index TermsAir-cavity, anodized aluminum, high Q inductor,
suspended inductor, 2.45 GHz band-pass filter (BPF).

I. INTRODUCTION

NTEGRATED passive device (IPD) technology has garnered significant attention in recent years and has been developed to integrate all kinds of passive devices such as LPF,
band-pass filter (BPF), balun, diplexer, and various matching
blocks [1], [2], [3]. High resistivity silicon (HRS) and GaAs
are used as the substrate to make the IPDs and it is possible
to realize compact and high-performance devices due to thin
film and photolithography processes. Generally, inductors are
the key elements of the IPDs. The Q factors of the inductors
that are realized on HRS or GaAs substrates are in the range of
2030 at 2 GHz [2], [4], [5], and this value is sufficient to design
most IPDs, except BPF, in wireless communication systems.
Because BPFs are designed by using multiple LC resonators to
suppress the harmonics or adjacent noise with a narrow bandwidth, they require higher Q than other IPDs. Over the years,
there have been many publications regarding the improvement
of inductor Q. Suspended structures have been considered as
one of the ways to improve the Q factor of the spiral inductor
[6], [7]. This can increase Q while reducing parallel substrate
capacitance. However, there are complex processes to support
the structures, and their structures are unstable because of the
weakness of the thin membrane.
In this letter, we propose a new suspended inductor using a
thick anodized alumina, and a 2.45 GHz BPF is designed and
fabricated using the inductors. The anodized alumina can support the inductors more robustly than any other membrane, such
as SiO or SiN , and it is easy to realize the air-cavity by using
selective chemical wet-etching.
Manuscript received April 09, 2009; revised June 02, 2009. First published
September 04, 2009; current version published September 23, 2009. This work
was supported by the IT R&D Program, MKE/IITA. [2008-S-013-01, System in
Package (SIP) platform using a selectively anodized aluminum wafer with high
thermal conductivity].
The authors are with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Taejon 305-701, Korea (e-mail:
radio@kaist.ac.kr).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LMWC.2009.2029735

Fig. 1. (a) Schematic of the suspended spiral inductor. (b) Fabrication processes of the suspended inductor.

II. SUSPENDED INDUCTOR

Integrated passives and RF modules using selectively anodized aluminum substrates were first proposed in 2005 [8],
[9]. Fig. 1 shows the structure and fabrication process of the
suspended spiral inductor on the selectively anodized aluminum adjusting advance technology. The 0.8 mm thickness
of aluminum 1050, which has purities of 99.5%, was used to
create the substrate. Before adjusting the thin-film process, the
surface of the raw aluminum was processed by lapping and
polishing. The surface roughness of the polished aluminum
was below 100 . To anodize selectively, SiN was used as a
mask material and 5% oxalic acid was used as the electrolyte
for the anodizing process. The thickness of anodized aluminum
oxide was 80 m and it took 4 h to make the oxide in 75 V
(dc). Island ground vias could be easily realized during the
selective anodizing process. Copper electroplating was used to
make thick metallization, and an air-bridge was used to connect

1531-1309/$26.00 2009 IEEE

YOOK et al.: SUSPENDED SPIRAL INDUCTOR AND BAND-PASS FILTER

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Fig. 3. (a) Circuit diagram of the 2.45 GHz BPF. (b) S21 for various induc.
tances of

3.19 nH. The metal thickness of the spiral inductor was 10 m

and the U-shape inductor had a metal thickness of 20 m,
. The
which was composed of three metal layers
U-shape inductor has a very high Q factor of more than 50 due
to the large signal width and thick metal at 2 GHz, and its series inductance was increased from 0.53 to 0.67 nH when the
inductor was suspended.
Fig. 2. Photographs of the fabricated suspended inductors and their measurement results. (a) Spiral inductor. (b) U-shape inductor. (c) Q and series inm, W (width)
ductance of the spiral inductor (ID (inner diameter)
m, S (spacing)
m, t (metal thickness)
m, N (turn)
: ). (d) Q and series inductance of the U-shape inductor (
m,
m,
m).

= 20
=25
W = 80

= 10

t = 20

= 220
= 10
ID = 380

the inner signal to an outer port. After all metallization processes were complete, porous anodized alumina was selectively
wet-etched. The anodized alumina was well etched vertically
by using buffered oxide etchant (BOE) or oxalic acid due to
its porous structures [10]. It took 45 min to etch the oxide
when the diluted BOE was used. Aluminum could be etched
using diluted hydrochloric acid (HCl) to a depth of 120 m, so
the total depth of the air-cavity was 200 m. The etch rate of
aluminum was 810 m for 1 min. The etching selectivity of
HCl between alumina and aluminum was very high.
Fig. 2(a) and (b) show photographs of the fabricated suspended inductors, and their measurement results are represented
in Fig. 2(c) and (d), respectively. As shown Fig. 2(c), the Q
factor of the suspended spiral inductor is about 25% larger at
2 GHz, and its series inductance was increased from 2.64 to

III. 2.45 GHZ BPF

A 2.45 GHz narrow BPF was designed and fabricated by
using the suspended inductors. Two-stage resonators were used
as the BPF circuit model. To minimize insertion loss, two inductors of the resonators were designed with a U-shape with 80 m
of signal width. The circuit diagram is represented in Fig. 3(a).
is inserted to reflect the coupling effect between the two resonators so that it controls the bandwidth (BW1) of the filter.
affects the roll-off rate (BW2) of the BPF and higher
values
decreases attenmake steeper roll-off rates. However, large
uations for adjacent bands and harmonics.
Two inductors, , are used to improve attenuation in the high
frequency range, and Fig. 3(b) shows the s-parameters when the
is varied from 0 to 3 nH. As shown in this
inductance of the
figure, attenuation is improved as the inductance is increased.
cause increments of insertion
Because large inductances of
loss, its value is designed to be 3 nH.
Photographs of the fabricated BPFs are shown in Fig. 4(a)
and (b). Fig. 4(c) shows the measured s-parameters before and
after the substrate etching of the fabricated BPFs. Due to the

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IEEE MICROWAVE AND WIRELESS COMPONENTS LETTERS, VOL. 19, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2009

IV. CONCLUSION
We have proposed a suspended inductor using thick anodized
aluminum oxide. This structure is very easy to realize and robust due to the thick dielectric layer. The fabricated inductor
greatly improves the Q factor and inductance compared with
conventional inductors. The suspended single-turn inductor has
a Q factor of 55 at 2 GHz, and a narrow 2.45 GHz BPF can be
designed and fabricated using the inductor. The fabricated BPF
has 2.8 dB of insertion-loss at the pass-band, and its return-loss
is 14 dB. Due to the steep roll-off rate, the BPF has high attenuation at 2.18 GHz, and it has more than 25 dB attenuation at the
PCS (1.81.9 GHz) and CDMA (0.80.9 GHz) band.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors wish to acknowledge the contribution of the engineers and staff of Wavenics, Inc., KAIST, who greatly supported
this project.
REFERENCES

Fig. 4. (a) Fabricated BPF on selectively anodized aluminum. (b) Suspended

BPF with an air-cavity. (c) Measurement results of the BPFs.

TABLE I
SUMMARY OF MEASUREMENT RESULTS OF THE SUSPENDED BPF

increment of inductance and the Q factor of , the center frequency of the BPF was moved from 2.75 GHz to 2.45 GHz, and
its IL was improved from 3.4 dB to 2.8 dB. Furthermore, it had
a narrower bandwidth (BW2) than that shown in Fig. 3(b) behad an increment of inductance compared to design.
cause
Table I summarizes the measurement results of the suspended
BPF.

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