A complementary cross‐coupled voltage‐controlled oscillator using differential active inductor

Abstract

AbstractThis letter presents a new differential active inductor voltage‐controlled oscillator (VCO), which uses the complementary cross‐coupled pairs to generate differential negative resistance. The active inductor is formed with complementary CMOS. The proposed CMOS low‐phase noise VCO has been implemented with the United Manufacture Corp. (UMC) 90nm CMOS technology and the die area is 0.575 × 0.61 mm2. At the supply voltage of 0.9 V, the total power consumption is 4.5 mW. The free‐running frequency of VCO is tunable from 1.22 to 1.86 GHz as the tuning voltage is varied from 0.0 to 0.9 V. The measured phase noise at 1MHz offset is −111.56 dBc/Hz at the oscillation frequency of 1.22 GHz and the figure of merit of the proposed VCO is about −166.75 dBc/Hz. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:2039–2042, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27030