A −194.0dBc/Hz FoM CMOS tail-filtering VCO using Helium-3 ion irradiation technique

In this paper, a CMOS tail-filtering VCO using Helium-3 ion irradiated Q-enhanced inductors is presented. The prototype of this VCO is implemented in a standard 65-nm CMOS process. An improvement of approximately 2.5dB in FoM is achieved after the Helium-3 ion irradiation because of the inductor quality factor improvement. The VCO achieves a phase noise of -116.4dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset while only consuming a power of 520μW at 5.4GHz, which corresponds to a FoM of -194.0dBc/Hz.