Abstract—A 50 GHz cross-coupled complimentary differential LC VCO is presented in this paper. The VCO is implemented in 28nm bulk CMOS technology node and occupies an area of 0.007mm2 excluding the pads. The circuit draws 5.2mA of current from a 1.0V supply and delivers a zero to peak output swing of 310mV to 360mV to the output buffer. It achieves a worst case phase noise of -113.2dBc/Hz at 10MHz offset leading to a figure of merit (FOM) higher than 182.3dBc/Hz at 50GHz. By employing a differential tuning mechanism based on a varactor and switched capacitors the VCO can be tuned from 47.4GHz to 52.7GHz corresponding to a tuning range of 10.5%. Furthermore, through a tunable gate bias for the NMOS core transistors, the power consumption of the VCO can be adjusted depending on the load of the tank. This way a power efficient design is obtained.

Index Terms—voltage-controlled oscillators (VCO), mm-wave, cross-coupled pair, A-MOS varactor, CMOS

Cite: Kambiz Hadipour, Andrea Ghilioni, Junlei Zhao, and Andrea Mazzanti, "A Wide Tuning Range mm-Wave LC VCO," International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 1, pp. 70-74, March 2014. doi: 10.12720/ijeee.2.1.70-74