Phase noise reduction in CMOS LC oscillators using tail noise shaping and Gm3 boosting

This paper presents a new technique for Low-Phase Noise CMOS Quadrature differential oscillator with better phase noise. The design uses tail noise shaping along with Gm3 boosting circuit and third harmonic tuned LC tank for improved phase noise performance. The proposed quadrature oscillator circuit shows a 4 dB phase noise improvement over standard fixed bias quadrature oscillator. Post Layout Simulation results in a 0.18-um CMOS fabrication process show that the phase noise of the proposed quadrature oscillator to be - 114 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz frequency offsets respectively at a center frequency of 5-GHz. The improvement is higher than the sum of reductions provided by the individual techniques. The power consumed increases by a very small amount and thus the Figure of Merit (FOM) shows a 4 dB improvement.

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