High-Efficiency PCB-Embeddable Inductor for Vertical Power IVR Applications

This paper presents a substrate/PCB embeddable inductor device for Integrated Voltage Regulator (IVR) application. The inductor is fabricated with two new 100 MHz pre-release magnetic materials to suit highly integrated IVR for vertical power. The measured characteristics of the magnetic materials are presented and used in simulation models for the inductor device. The inductor is designed according to high-volume manufacturing capabilities with a target nominal height equal to the PCB core thickness of 0.3 mm, so that it can be embedded within the application PCB core or the SoC package substrate core and facilitate vertical power delivery. The fabricated inductor achieved 1.54 nH/mΩ and simulations indicate that it will achieve 97.5% inductor efficiency for V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">IN</inf> = 1.8 V, V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">OUT</inf> = 0.9 V, F<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SW</inf> = 100 MHz and I<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DC</inf> = 2 A.