A Low-Voltage and Low-Power 3-GHz CMOS LC VCO for S-Band Wireless Applications
A fully integrated 0.18-\(\upmu \hbox {m}\) CMOS LC-tank voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) suitable for low-voltage and low-power S-band wireless applications is proposed in this paper. In order to meet the requirement of low voltage applications, a differential configuration with two cross-coupled pairs by adopting admittance-transforming technique is employed. By using forward-body-biased metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistors, the proposed VCO can operate at 0.4V supply voltage. Despite the low power supply near threshold voltage, the VCO achieves wide tuning range by using a voltage-boosting circuit and the standard mode PMOS varactors in the proposed oscillator architecture. The simulation results show that the proposed VCO achieves phase noise of \(-\)120.1dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset and 39.3% tuning range while consuming only \(594~\upmu \hbox {W}\) in 0.4V supply. Figure-of-merit with tuning range of the proposed VCO is \(-\)192.1dB at 3GHz.
voltage-controlled oscillator (vco) low voltage admittance-transforming forward-body-biased low power voltage-boosting