A Low Power CMOS VCO for IEEE 802.11a Applications

A low power consumption CMOS complementary cross-coupled LC-tank voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is presented. The low power consumption VCO has been implemented with tsmc 0.18 mum 1P6M CMOS technology. A pseudo-resistance transistor is utilized to reduce the DC bias current under a fixed supply voltage. The circuit consumes 2.58 mA from a 1.6 V power supply which saves up to 27% power compared with the conventional one. Furthermore, the proposed circuit which has oscillated frequency from 5.14 GHz to 6.25 GHz obtains 19.5% of tuning range. The phase noise achieves -116 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency. The designed VCO can cover the frequency range of both 5.15 GHz-5.35 GHz and 5.725 GHz-5.825 GHz which is suitable for IEEE 802.11a receiver.