A wide tuning range QCCO based on CMOS active inductors

In this paper, a quadrature current-controlled oscillator (QCCO) based on active inductors has been implemented in SMIC 0.13 um 1P8M RF CMOS process. Simulation results show that this circuit can achieve a very wide tuning range of 85.7% from 400 MHz to 1 GHz and the phase noise is from -97.3 dBc/Hz@1MHz to -91.5 dBc/Hz@1MHz between the two ends of the tuning range. The QCCO core only draws approximately 3.5 mA current from a 1.2 V power supply. Due to the absence of conventional spiral inductors, this circuit occupies a much smaller areas.