A 1mW 5GHz current reuse CMOS VCO with low phase noise and balanced differential outputs

This paper presents a low-power current reuse LC voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) with low phase noise and balanced differential outputs. A detailed analysis on different current control schemes, including various biasing techniques and the switching active core technique is conducted. A new current reuse VCO with novel current control scheme is proposed to achieve optimal phase noise and well balanced differential outputs at less power consumption. The proposed 5GHz VCO, simulated in a 0.18μm CMOS process, exhibits a phase noise of −117.7dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset while drawing only 0.88 mA current from a 1.2 V supply.

[1]  Kun-You Lin,et al.  An ultra-low-power CMOS complementary VCO using three-coil transformer feedback , 2009, 2009 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

[2]  Yo-Sheng Lin,et al.  A miniature and low-power 24 GHz CMOS VCO using tunable lc source-degeneration and transformer feedback techniques for automotive radars , 2012 .

[3]  Kun-You Lin,et al.  A 24 GHz low power VCO with transformer feedback , 2009, 2009 IEEE Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits Symposium.

[4]  Salvatore Levantino,et al.  Suppression of flicker noise upconversion in a 65nm CMOS VCO in the 3.0-to-3.6GHz band , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference - (ISSCC).

[5]  Sang-Gug Lee,et al.  A 1mW current-reuse CMOS differential LC-VCO with low phase noise , 2005, ISSCC. 2005 IEEE International Digest of Technical Papers. Solid-State Circuits Conference, 2005..

[6]  Jan Craninckx,et al.  Wideband VCO with Simultaneous Switching of Frequency Band, Active Core and Varactor Size , 2006 .

[7]  Z. Wang,et al.  1-V ultra-low-power CMOS LC VCO for UHF quadrature signal generation , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems.

[8]  H.C. Luong,et al.  Ultra-low-Voltage high-performance CMOS VCOs using transformer feedback , 2005, IEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits.