Design of low-power and low-phase noise VCO in standard 0.13μm CMOS

A voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with low phase noise and low power dissipation for sub-harmonic mixing is proposed. A cross-coupled negative-resistance circuit with nMOS transistors in the feedback is adopted to suppress high-order harmonics. According to this proposed structure, low phase noise can be achieved under low power dissipation. The VCO chip including a cross-coupled differential buffers (not shown in this work) is implemented in 0.13μm CMOS process under a supply voltage of 1.2V and consumes a total power of 0.5 mW. The measured results show that the VCO with integrated buffers at 1 MH offset frequency has a phase noise of -138 dBc/Hz. The proposed design has a wide tuning range of 380-420 MHz under the tuning voltage of 0-1.2V power supply voltage.