A Sub-1V Low Power V-Band CMOS VCO With Self-Body-Bias

Abstract

This paper presents an integrated sub-IV low power millimeter-wave CMOS voltage-controlledoscillator (VCO). The VCO was fabricated with the commercial 1P6M 0.18 m CMOS technology. To reduce the power consumption, the self-body-bias scheme was used in the VCO design. Operated at 0.7V, the VCO circuitry consumes 2.1mW of power. The total chip size is 0.83mm x 0.35mm. The VCO tuning range covers from 52.2 GHz to 52.8 GHz and the corresponding Kvco is 860 MHz/V. The measured phase noise at 1-MHz offset from 52.2 GHz is -95 dBc/Hz, which leads to an excellent Figure-of-Merit (FOM) of -186 dBc/Hz.

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

“…Few fabricated VCOs in standard 1P6M 0.18‐μm CMOS technology operating above 40 GHz have been published [1–7]. A single‐ended fundamental oscillator to demonstrate the effectiveness of harmonics‐type VCO design is presented in Ref 1…”