A low phase noise dual‐band voltage‐controlled oscillator (VCO) is proposed to achieve large voltage swings at both high‐frequency and low‐frequency bands. The VCO consists of a dual‐resonance LC resonator and a cross‐coupled switching transistor pair. The dual‐resonance LC resonator comprises a parallel‐tuned LC resonator and a series‐resonant resonator. The proposed VCO has been implemented with the TSMC 0.18‐μm 1P6M CMOS technology and the core power consumption is 1.99 mW at the DC drain‐source bias of 0.51 V. The VCO can generate differential signals in the frequency range of 8.19–8.77 GHz and 3.38–3.84 and it also has comparable high output voltage swings at both low‐ and high‐frequency bands. The die area of the dual‐band VCO is 0.47 × 0.748 mm2. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:2349–2352, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27097

Abstract-This paper presents a complementary metal-oxidesemiconductor (CMOS) differential voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) implemented with the push-push principle. The push-push VCO uses two frequency doublers stacked in series with an LC quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) to share the dc current with the QVCO for low power consumption. The proposed CMOS VCO has been implemented with the TSMC 0.18 µm CMOS technology, and the die area is 0.822 × 1.564 mm 2 . At the supply voltage of 0.9 V, the total power consumption is 3.15 mW. The free-running frequency of VCO is tunable from 10 GHz to 11.15 GHz as the tuning voltage is varied from 0.0 V to 1.2 V. The measured phase noise at 1 MHz frequency offset is −114.93 dBc/Hz at the oscillation frequency of 9.99 GHz, and the figure of merit (FOM) of the proposed VCO is −190.0 dBc/Hz.

A 77 GHz monolithic voltage-controlled oscilla.tor is described. The active element is a "low-noise" pseudomorphic HEMT. Tuning is achieved with a second HEMT in which the source and drain are connected and the gate-channel capacitance forms a varactor diode. The oscillator has a 3dB tuning bandwidth of 230MHz and an output power of 300pW.