A High Output Power Active Inductor Based Voltage Controlled Oscillator for Bluetooth Applications in 90nm Process

This paper presents an active inductor based voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) design by most commonly used NMOS cross-coupled LC-tank topology. Differential configuration of active inductor is formed by two single ended active inductors which provide a high Q factor within the tuning range. The tuning range of the designed VCO is 2.17GHz to 2.72GHz (22.49%) with a low power consumption of 4.18761mW. The phase noise is -82.34 dBC/Hz at 2.4 GHz and FOM is -143.4 dBC/Hz at 1MHz frequency offset. Compared with the state-of-the-art, the designed active inductor based VCO provides high differential output power (2.158 dBm to 3.162 dBm) with a stable figure of merit (FOM) within the tuning range that outperform the other cited designs.