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A low phase noise LC‐VCO for phase‐locked frequency synthesizers
Author(s) -
Wang Hao X.,
Zhang Wei,
Liu Yan Y.,
Zhang Liang
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
microwave and optical technology letters
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.304
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1098-2760
pISSN - 0895-2477
DOI - 10.1002/mop.28337
Subject(s) - voltage controlled oscillator , phase noise , dbc , electrical engineering , offset (computer science) , inductor , cmos , microwave , voltage , materials science , electronic engineering , engineering , telecommunications , computer science , programming language
This article presents a low phase noise voltage‐controlled‐oscillator (VCO) using standard 0.18 um RF CMOS process. This VCO is based on the voltage‐biased technique with a tail‐current inductor. Design considerations toward low phase noise are given and some tradeoffs are also described. Measurements show that the VCO has a phase noise of −49.8 dBc/Hz at 1 kHz offset and −134.8 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the 1.49 GHz carrier frequency. Compared with some other recently reported current‐biased and voltage‐biased VCOs, this work shows a better phase noise performance with reasonable power consumption. This VCO has been successfully applied in phase‐locked frequency synthesizers. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Microwave Opt Technol Lett 56:1486–1492, 2014