A 0.73 mW low power 9.6 GHz LC voltage-controlled oscillator achieves constant KVCO and −189.2 FOM

Abstract

This article introduces a novel approach of LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to overcome the challenges present in the Phase-locked loop (PLL) in high-frequency applications and proposes a 9.6 GHz VCO based on gm-boosted structure. By utilizing a transformer and gain variation calibration technique, the proposed VCO reduces the losses caused by MOSFET’s operation in triode region, thereby improving phase noise. And KVCO remains relatively constant, fluctuating up and down by approximately 5 MHz around 100 MHz/V, which is suitable to be used in phase-locked-loops (PLL). The oscillator is fabricated in 22 nm CMOS process occupying 0.25 mm × 0.55 mm area and consuming 0.73 mW from 0.5 V supply voltage. The measured phase noise achieves −114.3 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset with a carrier frequency of 4.75 GHz, and the figure of merit (FoM) is −189.2 dBc/Hz. The results clearly demonstrate that the proposed design could work under low power consumption and achieve constant KVCO, making it well suitable for high-frequency PLL applications.