A monolithic 0.4 mW SOA LC voltage-controlled oscillator

A fully integrated LC voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) design is presented with a VCO core dissipation of only 0.4mW. Silicon on Anything technology (SOA) is used for implementation. The device library of SOA consist of high quality coils, varactors and low power transistors. With these key components, SOA enables VCO design for high tuning range and low phase noise at very low current levels. Measured VCO tuning range starts at 668 MHz and extends to 830 MHz which corresponds to 21.6% tuning range. Within this tuning range, the carrier to noise ratio (CNR) at 100 kHz offset frequency varies from 98.1 to 100.4 dBc/Hz. Comparison of this work with 8 recently published monolithic LC oscillators, establishes state of the art performance concerning power dissipation, tuning range and carrier to noise ratio.