Comparative Study of Microfabricated Inductors/Transformers for High-Frequency Power Applications

This paper presents a comparative study on different microfabricated inductors (microtransformers), which are suitable for high-frequency power application. The main topic of this study is comparing and analyzing the effect of some factors such as material type, number of turns, and coil form on microinductor performance considering a fixed chip size, fixed magnetic core size, and core form. Two different microtransformer designs with different magnetic core materials are considered in this work. The core materials used in this work are NiFe45/55 and CoFe45/55. Also, two types of device packages are developed, namely, Quad Flat No-Lead and FR4 embedded packages. For device testing, different high-frequency switching regulators available on the market are used. This study shows the influence of different parameters on the performance of a certain high-frequency application. In this paper, we discuss the influence of the design, magnetic material, and package type on thermal performance and the efficiency of the power application.