Design of a Voltage-Controlled Oscillator for Ka-Band Applications

Abstract

ABSTRACTA varactor-less cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator based on triple frequency is presented in this paper, which is optimized for a low phase noise and low power at the high frequency. The VCO consists a voltage to current, a triple frequency, and a mixer with band-pass filter. The varactor-less VCO adjusts the frequency with the current and voltage of transconductance cell. A network RF–CF–RF is applied to filter out the noise of current source at 2. The proposed circuit was simulated in a 0.18 µm CMOS RF technology with a 1.5 V supply voltage. The designed VCO demonstrates an oscillation frequency range from 11.59 to 13.96 GHz with the triple frequency from 35.8 to 40.3 GHz. The simulated VCO presents a phase noise of −110.1 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from a 40.3 GHz carrier frequency. The total figure of merit (FOMT) is −193.113 and −190.83 dBc/Hz with a DC power of 11.32 and 19.56 mW for VCO and total structure, respectively. The layout of the VCO occupies an area of 695.10 µm 627.80 µm.