CMOS Quadrature VCO Implemented With Two First-Harmonic Injection-Locked Oscillators

This letter presents a new quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO). The LC-tank QVCO consists of two first-harmonic injection-locked oscillators (ILOs). The outputs of one ILO are injected to the gates of the tail transistors on the other ILO and vice versa so as to force the two ILOs operate in quadrature. The proposed CMOS QVCO has been implemented with the TSMC 0.18 mum CMOS technology and the die area is 0.582 times 0.972 mm
²
. At the supply voltage of 1.0 V, the total power consumption is 8.0 mW. The free-running frequency of the QVCO is tunable from 5.31 GHz to 5.75 GHz as the tuning voltage is varied from 0.0 V to 1.0 V. The measured phase noise at 1 MHz offset is -120.01 dBc/Hz at the oscillation frequency of 5.31 GHz and the figure of merit (FOM) of the proposed QVCO is about -185.48 dBc/Hz.