A low-power millimeter wave VCO by using frequency doubling technique

A compact low-power VCO in 0.18 μm CMOS technology is presented for V-band applications. Unlike conventional push-push VCOs using huge passive transmission-line-based frequency doublers to rise their output oscillation frequencies, the proposed VCO adopts a more compact transistor-based frequency doubler to reduce chip layout area. Under 1-V supply operation, experimental results show that the output power of VCO ranges from -13.5 dBm to -6.5 dBm over the V band of interest with low power dissipation from 6.3 mW to 16.1 mW excluding the output buffer. The measured phase noise is -93.12 dBc/Hz at 10MHz offset from 55 GHz carrier. This VCO only occupies a small chip layout area of 0.1 mm
²
excluding pads and bypass capacitors.