Utilization of MEMS Tunable Inductors in the design of RF voltage-controlled oscillators

This paper presents the concept of using a MEMS piezoelectric actuated tunable inductor in the design of a wideband high performance VCO. Furthermore, a model of the tunable inductor is presented to facilitate the VCO design and simulation. In addition, by means of this model important characteristics of the tunable inductor can be derived enabling a design of the VCO to be superior in phase noise and power consumption to one which makes use of conventional capacitive tuning as indicated by the simulation results.