Pulse-Biased Low-Power Low-Phase-Noise UHF LC-QVCO for 866 MHz RFID Front-End

This paper discusses an 866-MHz UHF quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) for RFID front-end. The VCO achieved an improved phase noise performance of -130 dBc/Hz at a carrier-offset of 1 MHz using an improved architecture employing pulsed self-biasing. It was fabricated using the IBM 130-nm CMOS process with the core VCO occupying around 0.36 mm² die area. The loading effect of finite g_ds for nanometric CMOS design was also considered. The VCO achieved 8% tuning range with very low quadrature error. It was tested using a power supply in the range of 0.6-1 V, drawing a maximum of 2.5 mW. In addition, it achieved a figure of merit of -185 dBc/Hz.