A 5-GHZ VCO for WLAN applications

A fully monolithic 5 GHz CMOS LC-VCO, designed in a 0.18 μm 1P6M CMOS technology, is presented in this paper. The tuning range of the VCO is from 4.1 GHz to 5.24 GHz, about 24%. The measured phase noise at 5-GHz is -115.8 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the carrier. It meets the requirements for IEEE 802.11a WLAN standard. The current dissipation of the VCO is 2 mA from the 1.8 V power supply.