K-rail diagrams - comprehensive tool for full performance characterization of voltage-controlled oscillators

So far, many parameters and figures of merit characterizing the performances of voltage-controlled oscillators have been introduced, but it is nowhere clearly stated how all those parameters and figures trade among each other. Frequently, there is just a rough impression of how oscillators can trade power consumption for loop-gain and phase-noise. What is more, if these key parameters are to be set by the communication system in an adaptive way and not by the crude hardware design, many concepts fail, due to incomplete knowledge of how the change of one parameter is reflected to the others. For this purpose, K-rail diagrams are introduced in this paper, offering the possibility for an all-round performance characterization of voltage-controlled oscillators, including adaptivity. Also, the K-rail diagrams give an explicit qualitative and quantitative explanation of all the existing relations and trade-offs among the oscillator parameters such as voltage-swing, tank conductance, power consumption, phase-noise and loop-gain.