A low voltage balanced Clapp VCO in 0.13 micromolar CMOS technology

Abstract

A balanced voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is designed and implemented in a 0.13 μm CMOS 1P8M process.The designed VCO circuit topology is an all nMOS LC-tank Clapp VCO using a series-tuned resonator. At the supply voltage of 0.5 V, the output phase noise of the VCO is −108.69 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency from the carrier frequency of 17.72 GHz, and the figure of merit is −186.84 dBc/Hz. The core power consumption is 4.2 mW. Tuning range is about 3.32 GHz, from 17.55 to 20.87 GHz, while the control voltage was tuned from 0 to 1.3 V. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 52: 1623–1625, 2010; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/mop.25275