A voltage-controlled oscillator with an ultra-low supply voltage and its application to a fractional-N phase-locked loop

Abstract

With feature size scaling, the supply voltage of digital circuits is becoming lower and lower. As a result, the supply voltage of analogue and RF circuits must also be reduced for system on chip (SoC) realisation. This article proposes an ultra-low-supply voltage-controlled oscillator (ULSVCO) and designs a sigma–delta fractional-N frequency synthesiser which adopts such ULSVCO. A mathematical phase-noise model is built here to describe the noise performance of the low-supply voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). The substrate of the cross-coupled NMOSFETs in the proposed ULSVCO is not grounded but connected to the supply to further reduce the supply voltage. Implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS technology, the proposed ULSVCO can be operated at a supply voltage as low as 0.41 V, the central frequency is set to 1.55 GHz, the phase noise is −116 dBc/Hz@1.0 MHz. The minimum supply voltage is decreased by about 11% after our idea is adopted and the power consumption of the ULSVCO is only 1.04 mW. With the proposed ULSVCO, we design a sigma–delta-modulator (SDM) fractional-N phase-locked loop frequency synthesiser, which has a 1.43–1.75 GHz frequency tuning range. When the loop bandwidth is set to 100 KHz, the phase noise of our PLL is −110 dBc/Hz@1.0 MHz.