Splitting Conductors of Coils on PCB for AC-resistance Reduction

This letter proposes a method to suppress copper loss due to the skin and proximity effect (AC-resistance) by splitting the conductors of a coil on a printed circuit board (PCB) into some traces and swapping them at the corner of the coil. The proposed structure for the coil is characterized as having no via, which results in an increase in cost and copper loss. The simulation results demonstrate that in the proposed coil comprising 12 corners (12c coil), splitting a conductor into three traces, the resistance is suppressed by 16.7% compared with a spiral coil, and the quality factor is improved by 11.0%. Practical experiments on the prototype of the 12c coil further revealed improvements in the resistance and quality factor by 19.7% and 18.8%, respectively.