A low phase noise 8.8 GHz VCO based on ISF manipulation and dual-tank technique

This paper presents a novel 8.8 GHz voltage-controlled oscillator (V CO), which employs a dual-tank structure and the impulse sensitivity function (ISF) manipulation technique. By utilizing these techniques, the behavior of both the tail and the cross-coupled transistors is optimized compared to the conventional VCO; therefore, the noise from the transistors and the low quality of tank is reduced; resulting in better phase noise performance. The circuit is implemented in 130nm BiCMOS technology, and achieves −115.26dBc/Hz @ 1MHz offset with 4 percent frequency tuning range. The power consumption is between 80mW and 100mW from a 2.5V power supply, and the figure of merit (FoM) is 175dBc/Hz.

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