A K-Band VCO Employing High Active Q-factor Defected Ground Structure Resonator in 0.18pm CMOS Technology

Abstract

In this paper, a new theory to improve the phase noise of a Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO) utilizing dual series and parallel resonance to improve the susceptance slope parameter of the resonator circuit is proposed, and its effectiveness is demonstrated to design a low phase noise K-band VCO. The proposed dual resonance is realized using a compact defected ground structure (DGS) resonator, which achieve the additional series resonance by loading its transmission line by a series capacitor. The resulting susceptance slope, and active quality (Qk-) factor of the resonator circuit enhance that, in returns, improves the phase noise by 3.2dB of the same circuit without the series resonance. The design is implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, and the post-layout simulation results show that VCO has a tuning range of 3.4%, and low phase noise with − 111.9 dBc/Hz @1 MHz offset at 21.04 GHz oscillation. The VCO consumes 7.5 mW power resulting in a FoM of −188.7 dB.