A High Efficiency Differential 60 GHz VCO in a 65 nm CMOS Technology for WSN Applications

This letter presents a differential voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) implemented in a 65 nm bulk CMOS technology for the unlicensed 60 GHz band. It achieves a record efficiency of 4.9% by generating a maximum differential output power of -0.9 dBm while drawing 16.5 mA from a 1 V supply (including buffers). This VCO is thus perfectly suited for the use in a fully integrated 60 GHz transceiver for battery-powered wireless sensor networks (WSN). The minimum measured phase noise is -90.3 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset and -112 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset, the measured tuning range reaches from 57.6 to 60.8 GHz.