A Tiny Quadrature Oscillator Using Low-Q Series LC Tanks

A new quadrature oscillator topology is proposed, which arranges four low-Q series LC tanks in a ring structure driven by inverters operating in class-D. With a very small area of 0.007 mm2 that is comparable to conventional ring oscillators, this oscillator has 7-20 dB better phase noise FoM of 177 dB. It is widely tunable for nearly an octave from 2.66 to 4.97 GHz.

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