Low-power quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator using current-reuse and transformer-based Armstrong topologies

Abstract

A new low-power current-reuse quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) is proposed. The proposed QVCO couples two complementary current-reuse Armstrong voltage-controlled oscillators (VCOs) using series coupling switches. The current-reuse technique reduces the power consumption, and the transformer-based Armstrong configuration improves the phase noise performance by increasing the negative G(m) of the VCO core. The proposed QVCO consumes 2.46 mW of power at 8.71 GHz from a 1.1 V supply. The measured phase noise is -113.3 dBc/Hz at the offset frequency of 1 MHz, and the figure of merit is -188.2 dBc/Hz. The frequency tuning range is from 8.34 to 9.13 GHz. The chip area is 700 x 340 m(2) in a 0.13 m CMOS process.