7-decades tunable translinear SiGe BiCMOS 3-phase sinusoidal oscillator

A fully differential translinear 3-phase sinusoidal oscillator architecture is presented. The architecture is meant for BiCMOS implementation and uses only NPN devices, typically of higher performance than their PNP counterparts in most technologies. The architecture features both frequency and amplitude control and expressions are derived showing the dependence of these controls to external current biases. Measurements on a 0.5 mum SiGe BiCMOS implementation of the architecture demonstrate frequency control from below 80 Hz to above 800 MHz, general agreement between theory and actual data for the amplitude of oscillation, as well as low distortion. Power consumption scales with the frequency of operation and amounts to ~2 muW/MHz.