A power-aware rotary traveling wave oscillator (RTWO) design in 0.18um CMOS

RTWO represents a transmission line based technology for clock generation providing low skew, low phase noise and multiphase signal. Compared to traditional LC oscillators, one major drawback in RTWO performance is high power consumption. To minimize power consumption, a half circuit implementation of gain stage is proposed. The concept is validated by X-band RTWOs using conventional and proposed gain stage, respectively, in 0.18um CMOS technology. The proposed circuit consumes 30mW with the phase noise of -98.2 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset compared to 38mW with the phase noise of -87.3 dBc/Hz for the conventional circuit.