An X-band low voltage cross-coupled voltage-controlled oscillator IC in 56-nm SOI CMOS

An X-band voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) IC is presented in this paper for low voltage operation. The LC-VCO IC consists of a cross-coupled pMOSFET pair, an LC tank circuit and buffer amplifiers. The LC-VCO IC is designed, fabricated and fully evaluated on-wafer using 56-nm SOI CMOS technology. The fabricated VCO IC has exhibited a measured phase noise of -119.02 dBc/Hz at 5 MHz offset from the 9.8 GHz carrier frequency at an operation voltage of only 0.5 V.