A low power current-reuse LC-VCO with an adaptive body-biasing technique

Abstract

This work presents a low-power low-phase noise current-reuse LC voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) with an adaptive body-biasing technique that enhances the reliability of the proposed circuit under process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) variations. Furthermore, the supply voltage and power consumption of the proposed VCO are reduced by the start-up oscillation condition that is provided by the adaptive body-biased circuit. This property is in fact very interesting from the power management perspective. The proposed VCO works at carrier frequency of 1.8 GHz and draws the power of only 306 µW from a 0.9 V supply. It achieves phase noise of −123.36 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset and provides a figure-of-merit (FoM) of −193.61 dBc/Hz. The post-layout simulation results of designed VCO in 0.18 µm standard CMOS technology confirm the effectiveness of the proposed circuit.