An Integrated 5–2.5-GHz Direct-Injection Locked Quadrature $LC$ VCO

Abstract

This letter presents an integrated direct-injection locked quadrature voltage controlled oscillator (VCO), consisted of a 5-GHz VCO integrated with injection locked LC frequency dividers for low-power quadrature generation. The circuit is implemented using a standard 0.18-mum CMOS process. The differential VCO is a full PMOS Colpitts oscillator, and the frequency divider is performed by adding an injection nMOS between the differential outputs of complementary cross-coupled np-core LC VCO. The measurement results show that at the supply voltage of 1.8-V, the master 5-GHz VCO is tunable from 4.73 to 5.74GHz, and the slave 2.5-GHz VCO is tunable from 2.36 to 2.87GHz. The measured phase noise of master VCO is -118.2dBc/Hz while the locked quadrature output phase noise is -124.4dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset frequency, which is 6.2dB lower than the master VCO. The core power consumptions are 7.8 and 8.7mW at master and slave VCOs, respectively