A Sub-1V Low Power V-Band CMOS VCO With Self-Body-Bias

This paper presents an integrated sub-1V low power millimeter-wave CMOS voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO). The VCO was fabricated with the commercial 1P6M 0.18mum CMOS technology. To reduce the power consumption, the self-body-bias scheme was used in the VCO design. Operated at 0.7V, the VCO circuitry consumes 2.1 mW of power. The total chip size is 0.83mm times 0.35mm. The VCO tuning range covers from 52.2 GHz to 52.8 GHz and the corresponding K_vco is 860 MHz/V. The measured phase noise at 1-MHz offset from 52.2 GHz is -95 dBc/Hz, which leads to an excellent figure-of-merit (FOM) of -186 dBc/Hz.