A 4.6‐mW 45‐GHz compact‐size darlington‐pair LC‐VCO IN 0.18‐μm cmos technology

Abstract

This work proposes a 45‐GHz Darlington‐pair voltage‐controlled oscillator (VCO) in 0.18‐μm CMOS process. The Darlington‐pair transistors achieve a 10.3‐GHz higher unit gain cutoff frequency (fT) and lower negative resistance than those obtained in single MOS counterpart. This feature lowers the minimum current to start oscillation and hence reduces the power consumption in millimeter‐wave frequency regime. Meanwhile, a high‐Q straight transmission line is used to replace the inductor of the VCO resonator and achieves a good phase noise of −106.3 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset. The achieved figure‐of‐merit is −172.7 dBc/Hz while consumes a low direct current (DC) power consumption of 4.6 mW from a 1.5 V supply. The chip size including all pads is 0.19 mm2. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 55:648–652, 2013; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27380

A −187.7‐FoM V‐band low‐power CMOS VCO using modified fT‐doubler with current‐reused technique

“…Darlington cell topology is an efficient way to reduce the parasitic capacitance of the composited transistors. In our previous works, Darlington f T ‐doubler has been successfully applied in various MMW ICs, such as VCO , low noise amplifier and mixer , and power amplifier designs . In this work, a modified Darlington f T ‐doubler with current‐reused technique is proposed to design a low power and low phase noise VCO.…”