The present work is centered in the controversy between two approaches to inductance extraction: loop vs. partial treatments for IC applications. We advocate for the first one, justifying this claim in terms of representing more realistically the physical situation, as well as having better sparseness properties. We argue that the drawbacks of loop inductance treatment are small for frequencies above 1 GHz. Within the loop inductance formulation, we develop an efficient way of calculating mutual inductances between loops in terms of the field generated by a magnetic dipole. On numerical simulations, the dipole approximation shows good accuracy when compared to FastHenry, down to distances of 30μ for 0.13μ processes. The dipole approximation leads naturally to selection rules for discarding certain couplings that can be experimentally verified.
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