An Ultra-Low-Voltage High-Performance VCO in 0.13 μm CMOS

An LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is proposed to achieve low-phase-noise and low-power designs even at a 0.5 V supply. The advantages of the proposed LC VCO are described together with its detailed analysis and its characteristics. Despite of the low power supply, the VCO achieves wide tuning range by using a voltage-boosted technique which can generate voltage higher than the supply voltage to bias the varactors. The VCO measures a phase noise of −113.83 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from 3.126 GHz oscillation frequency with 1.765 mW power dissipation drawn from 0.5 V power supply. The figure-of-merit (FOM) for this VCO is comparable to that of other state-of-the-art VCO designs operating at much higher supply voltage.

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