Accurate characterization of MEM inductors on lossy silicon

This paper presents the performance characteristics of an air‐suspended high‐Q MEM inductor that is characterized based on an open‐short deembedding scheme and used for accurate and reliable evaluation of the parasitic effects experienced from feed lines as well as contact pads. The validity and effectiveness of the de‐embedding method are proven with a fixed‐length MEM transmission line along with various feed‐line topologies. The measured inductances of the 20‐μm elevated transmission line provide consistent data, as compared to the simpler open de‐embedding method. For more realistic and complicated MEM inductors with 1.5 and 2.5 turns, the characterized inductance values agree very well with the calculated data, based on the Greenhouse algorithm. The measured and calculated inductances are within the 5% range. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 43: 355–358, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.20468