A self-correcting quadrature voltage controlled oscillator

Abstract

A self-correcting quadrature voltage controlled oscillator (QVCO) with phase correcting loop is proposed. It comprises the QVCO core and phase correcting loop, which corrects the quadrature phase error. Two LC VCOs, buffers, and phase shifters are coupled in circular configuration to achieve IQ symmetry. This paper introduces the idea of realizing QVCO with low phase noise and accurate quadrature phase by using the phase correcting loop. The simulation results based on the 65 nm CMOS process show that the self-correcting QVCO has a phase error less than 0.5° and 1 MHz offset phase noise of −120 dBc/Hz at 3.7 GHz with 49% tuning range.