A 1-V low-voltage 12-GHz VCO in 0.18-µm CMOS technology

The CMOS process moves into the sub-micron regime, low voltage circuit design techniques will be required for highly integrated wireless transceivers. The complementary CMOS VCO is a simple design topology for high frequency and low phase noise. However, it requires a high supply voltage due to the stacking of transistors. For operating at the low voltage, in this paper a modified complementary coupled-pair CMOS LC-tank oscillator is adopted to design the VCO. A low-voltage and low-phase-noise 12-GHz VCO using the 0.18-mum CMOS process is presented. The fabricated VCO has a good figure of merit (FOM) of -186 dBc/Hz with a 6.2 mW power consumption operating at 1 V.