A Small-Area Solenoid Inductor Based Digitally Controlled Oscillator

Abstract

This paper presents a wide band, fine-resolution digitally controlled oscillator (DCO) with an on-chip 3-D solenoid inductor using the 0.13 mu m digital CMOS process. The on-chip solenoid inductor is vertically constructed by using Metal and Via layers with a horizontal scalability. Compared to a spiral inductor, it has the advantage of occupying a small area and this is due to its 3-D structure. To control the frequency of the DCO, active capacitor and active inductor are tuned digitally. To cover the wide tuning range, a three-step coarse tuning scheme is used. In addition, the DCO gain needs to be calibrated digitally to compensate for gain variations. The DCO with solenoid inductor is fabricated in 0.13 mu m process and the die area of the solenoid inductor is 0.013 mm(2). The DCO tuning range is about 54 % at 4.1 GHz, and the power consumption is 6.6 mW from a 1.2 V supply voltage. An effective frequency resolution is 0.14 kHz. The measured phase noise of the DCO output at 5.195 GHz is -110.61 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset.