A 1-V CMOS VCO for 60-GHz applications

An integrated 1-V, 50-GHz CMOS voltage-controlled-oscillator (VCO) is presented for the emerging 60-GHz UWB applications. Implemented in a commercial 0.18μm CMOS technology, the core VCO circuitry consumes 4mW of power and occupies only 90μm×120μm of the silicon estate. The high quality-factor line inductors and NMOS varactors are used to construct the LC-resonators. The measured phase noise at 1-MHz offset from 49 GHz is -96 dBc/Hz, which leads to an excellent figure-of-merit (FOM) of -184 dBc/Hz.