A LOW-PHASE-NOISE CMOS VCO FOR K-BAND APPLICATION

Abstract

A new high figure-of-merit (FOM) and low-phase-noise 20.73-GHz voltage-controlled oscillator is designed for K-band applications in this paper. The capacitive feedback technique is used for the low-phase-noise VCO design. The VCO can be tuned from 20.817 GHz to 20.266 GHz. The measured phase noise is -115.57 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the carrier frequency. The corresponding FOM is calculated to be -190 dBc/Hz. The VCO is implemented with the TSMC 0.18 μm one-poly-six-metal 1.7 V mixed-signal/RF CMOS technology, and the chip size is 0.51 × 0.74 mm2.