Design of low power VCO using Gm-boosted technique for WLAN applications

A 5 GHz CMOS LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) for low power WLAN applications, fabricated using CMOS 0.18um process, is presented in this paper. To reduce the power consumption, the proposed VCO employs a cross-coupled architecture with Gm-boosted configuration. Measured results of the proposed VCO reveal phase noise of 115.7dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset and tuning range of 4.25GHz~5.12GHz (17%) while consuming only 3mW under the supply voltage of 1.6V. The core area is 0.763mm × 0.616mm.