A 400 mV, widest-tuning-band- VCO with a central Frequency of 10.5 GHz and FTR of 2.5 GHz, designed in 22 nm FDSOI CMOS technology

A 10.5 GHz, ultra-low-power, wide frequency tuning range (FTR) of 2.5 GHz, LC-VCO IC is presented in this paper. The designed VCO is integrated with a cascode buffer designed for 50 Ω load impedance. The design is realized with the 22 nm FDSOI CMOS technology. The back-gate-bias feature is used for the optimization of power consumption, output power and the phase noise. The wide range of the FTR of 24.3 % can be useful in the different application of IOT and 5G. The measured phase noise of the VCO is -117 dBc/Hz @ 11.4 GHz at the offset frequency of 10 MHz and minimum power consumption of the VCO core block is 567μW @ 400 mV. The average output power of the VCO is -12 dBm and the best measured output power is -8 dBm.