A CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator using a cascode structure

Abstract

In this study, a cascode CMOS voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) to reduce the power consumption related to the RF system level and to increase the output power was proposed. The proposed VCO core consists of a cascode structure to increase the supply voltage of the VCO. To mitigate the reliability problems associated with gate-source and gate-drain breakdowns, the gate nodes of common-source transistors were connected to the source nodes of common-gate transistors. To verify the functionality of the proposed VCO, a 2.4-GHz CMOS VCO using the 110-nm RF CMOS process was designed. From the measured results, a relatively high output power with a 2.2 V supply voltage was obtained. (c) 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 58:1560-1563, 2016