Micromachined spiral inductors using UV-LIGA techniques

Integrated planar inductors are fundamentally important to the development of fully integrated magnetic MEMS devices as well as for RF and microwave applications. For many applications, it is important that inductors be CMOS compatible, as this allows for the possible addition of on-chip circuitry. Spiral inductors are typically the simplest inductors to fabricate and are often suited for use as smart sensors and electronic components. In this paper we have designed, fabricated, characterized and compared several different types of spiral inductors, all of which were fabricated by means of a thick photoresist lithography process referred to as UV-LIGA.