A complementary cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator using differential active inductor.

This letter presents a new differential active inductor voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO), which uses the complementary cross-coupled pairs to generate differential negative resistance. The active inductor is formed with complementary CMOS. The proposed CMOS low-phase noise VCO has been implemented with the United Manufacture Corp. (UMC) 90nm CMOS technology and the die area is 0.575 × 0.61 mm2. At the supply voltage of 0.9 V, the total power consumption is 4.5 mW. The free-running frequency of VCO is tunable from 1.22 to 1.86 GHz as the tuning voltage is varied from 0.0 to 0.9 V. The measured phase noise at 1MHz offset is −111.56 dBc/Hz at the oscillation frequency of 1.22 GHz and the figure of merit of the proposed VCO is about −166.75 dBc/Hz. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 54:2039-2042, 2012; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com. DOI 10.1002/mop.27030 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]