A low power millimetre-wave VCO in 0.18 µm SiGe BiCMOS technology

A 36 GHz low power voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is proposed and designed in 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS process. The VCO core part adopts a triple coupled transformer to provide feedbacks and to decouple the base voltage from the collector of the bipolar transistors, such that the voltage swing and phase noise can be improved. Besides, a transformer-based buffer is used to reduce the total power consumption of the design and provide matching. From the simulation results, the proposed VCO achieves low phase noise from -95 to -102.2dBc/Hz at 1MHz offset from the oscillation frequency while consumes only 5.76 mW DC power for the whole chip.