Integrated chip design of a 10GHz band voltage controlled oscillator and charge-injected mixer with low phase noise and wide tuning range

A simple low phase noise and wide tuning range voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is designed for 10 GHz band application. The proposed oscillator adopts a complementary cross-coupled pair LC-VCO circuit with only one symmetrical inductor and implemented in TSMC 0.18-um CMOS process. A 10 GHz broadband CMOS double-balance mixer for communication receiver is presented. The broadband mixer is fabricated with low power 0.18 μm standard CMOS process. Measurement of the integrated mixer is performed as chipset input return loss is higher than 8.5 dB. At the supply voltage of 1.8 V, measured results achieve a tuning range of 9.6 to 11.08 GHz, corresponding to 13.9 %, a phase noise under -115.1 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz offset frequency from 10.02 GHz with a tuned control voltage from 0 to 1.7 V and an output power of -2.231 dBm at 50-Ω termination and at 10.02 GHz. The power consumption is 3.58 mW and the chip area including pads is 0.61×0.66 (0.37) mm². The proposed VCO, without the need of any off-chip device, is well suitable for mobile cellular networks applications.