Ultra-wideband voltage controlled oscillator with commutable phases for BPSK implementation

An ultra-wideband Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO) is presented in this paper. The circuit achieves fast startups and stops which allow wideband pulses to be generated. In addition, the VCO allows bipolar modulations as Binary Phase Shift Keying to be implemented without the need of a shaping circuit as a mixer. The proposed VCO has been integrated on a silicon area of 0.003mm² in a 65nm CMOS technology operating with a supply voltage of 1.2V. The oscillator output provides large differential oscillations from 2.6GHz to 12.3GHz. Measurement has demonstrated the frequency agility of the proposed VCO which covers the mandatory channels of the low (resp. high) bands centered on 4492.8MHz (resp. 7987.2MHz) defined by the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The VCO power consumption is about 3.2mW/GHz. By using Current Mode Logic (CML) gates, the power consumption can be reduced to 3.84uW only when the VCO is not running (switch off).