SiGe Bipolar VCO With Ultra-Wide Tuning Range at 80 GHz Center Frequency

Author

Pohl, Nils ; Rein, Hans-Martin ; Musch, Thomas ; Aufinger, Klaus ; Hausner, Josef

Author_Institution

Ruhr-Univ. Bochum, Bochum, Germany

Volume

44

Issue

10

fYear

2009

Firstpage

2655

Lastpage

2662

Abstract

A SiGe millimeter-wave VCO with a center frequency around 80 GHz and an extremely wide (continuous) tuning range of 24.5 GHz ( ap 30%) is presented. The phase noise at 1 MHz offset is -97 dBc/Hz at the center frequency (and less than -94 dBc/Hz in a frequency range of 21 GHz). The maximum total output power is about 12 dBm. A cascode buffer improves decoupling from the output load at reasonable VCO power consumption (240 mW at 5 V supply voltage). A low-power frequency divider (operating up to 100 GHz) provides, in addition, a divided-by-four signal. As a further intention of this paper, the basic reasons for the limitation of the tuning range in millimeter-wave VCOs are shown and the improvement by using two (instead of one) varactor pairs is demonstrated.

Keywords

Ge-Si alloys; frequency dividers; voltage-controlled oscillators; SiGe; bipolar VCO; cascode buffer; divided-by-four signal; frequency 100 GHz; frequency 21 GHz; frequency 24.5 GHz; low-power frequency divider; millimeter-wave VCO; power 240 mW; voltage 5 V; voltage controlled oscillators; Energy consumption; Frequency conversion; Germanium silicon alloys; Phase noise; Power generation; Silicon germanium; Tuning; Varactors; Voltage; Voltage-controlled oscillators; Millimeter-wave VCOs; SiGe bipolar ICs; regenerative frequency divider; ultra-wideband; voltage-controlled oscillators;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Solid-State Circuits, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9200

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/JSSC.2009.2026822

Filename

5256966