A low power, low phase noise VCO using cascoded active inductor

This paper presented a tunable active inductor VCO with varactor bank. A negative CMOS cross coupled pair is added to reduce losses and improves quality factor. This configuration is selected due to ease of oscillation and a relatively straight forward design approach. Tuning range is achieved from a 6 band MOS varactor bank having low VCO gain. The differential active inductor has been implemented using SCL 0.18 μm CMOS technology. The proposed design achieves a tuning range of 11% and a phase noise of -111.9 dBc/Hz. The power consumption is 8.7 mW using 1.8 V supply voltage.