A Wideband Millimeter-Wave Harmonic Injection-locked Oscillator in 130-nm BiCMOS Technology

This paper proposes a wideband millimeter-wave (mm-wave) harmonic injection-locked oscillator in 130-nm BiC-MOS technology. The cascaded oscillator consists of a Class-F23 voltage control oscillator (VCO) and a mm-wave injection-locked frequency tripler (ILFT). The Class-F23 VCO is realized by a transformer-based resonant cavity, which generates a fundamental (11.10-13.74 GHz) and its third harmonic (33.30-41.22 GHz) signal simultaneously. As a result, the VCO has lower phase noise and richer harmonic components as compared with traditional VCO. A transformer is designed to increase the level of the injected current for the mm-wave ILFT. Moreover, a source degenerated notch filter in the ILFT can suppress the fundamental frequency of the Class-F23 VCO, thus decreasing sub-harmonic spurs greatly. Simulation results show the proposed oscillator exhibits phase noise from -100.542 to -104.866 dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset in 33.30-41.22 GHz, the DC power consumption is ~32.657 mW, tuning range (TR) inclusive figure-of-merit (FoMT) of - 186.639 dBc/Hz, and sub-harmonic spurs < -25.37 dBc. The core of the designed oscillator occupies 0.156 mm².