A fully integrated low phase noise VCO for IEEE 802.11a WLAN transceivers in 0.18μm CMOS

A fully integrated voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) for IEEE 802.11a WLAN transceivers is proposed and implemented in 0.18 μm CMOS technology with 1.8 V supply voltage. The VCO core adopts the topology of complementary cross-coupled differential inductance-capacitance (LC) tank. The VCO operates from 4.56 to 4.77 GHz with the varactor control voltage (V
_tune
) changing from 0.3 to 1.5 V and has a gain (K
_v
) of 175 MHz/V. A phase noise of -122.3 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency is demonstrated for an oscillation frequency of 4.56 GHz. The average power consumption of this VCO is 30.24 mW.