A 10.5-mW 60-GHz QVCO Employing Hybrid Back-Gate and Tail Inductive Coupling in 22-nm FD-SOI Technology

This work introduces a quadrature-voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) that employs the proposed hybrid back-gate and tail inductive coupling technique. The implemented QVCO on silicon occupies a die area of 0.03 mm2 in 22-nm FD-SOI technology. The power consumption of the QVCO operating with a 1-V supply voltage is 10.5 mW which, to the best of our knowledge, is comparable to the state of the art. The time and frequency-domain measurement results in the free-running mode show a phase noise (PN) of −112.1 dBc/Hz at 10-MHz offset from 60.2 GHz. The phase error throughout the whole tuning range is below 4.8°. At 10-MHz offset, the QVCO in this work achieves
$FoM$
and
${FoM_{A}}$
of −177.5 and −192.7 dBc/Hz, respectively. They are in line among the bulk CMOS mm-wave QVCOs, despite the challenges imposed by short channel effects in 22-nm FD-SOI technology.