An integrated spiral DGS and an open stub meander-line resonator in the 0.13-µm BiCMOS technology for a 18-GHz band oscillator

Abstract

In this paper, an 18 GHz voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with improved phase noise (PN) and smaller size is proposed. The filter consists of an open stub resonator and an integrated spiral Defective Ground Structure (DGS) resonator. The proposed oscillator is designed in the 0.13-µm SiGe BiCMOS technology. The differential cross-coupled VCO uses a bandpass filter. In this work, the conventional large-size coil is replaced by a resonator based on our proposed open stub resonator and defected ground structure (DGS) where the filter is equivalent to the large coil and the associated capacitors. The use of the filter results in a great reduction of VCO size, low losses, and low power consumption, hence an enhancement in the quality factor. The integrated spiral DGS is etched on the third metal layer (M3) below an open stub meander line onthe top metal layer (TM2) of the 0.13-µm top metal two (TM2) BiCMOS technology. The proposed VCO has a small die area of 0.089 mm2 and has FoMA of 188.8 dB and a power consumption is 13.38 mw. The simulated carrier frequency and phase noise are 18-GHz and −123.59 dBc/Hz (−103.7 dBc/Hz) at 10-MHz (1 MHz) offset frequency, respectively, which results in a figure of merit of 177.37 dB.