A Wide Tuning Range Voltage Controlled Oscillator with a High Tunable Active Inductor

作者：Kia Hojjat Babaei^*; A'ain Abu Khari

来源：Wireless Personal Communications, 2014, 79(1): 31-41.

DOI：10.1007/s11277-014-1839-3

• Voltage controlled oscillator (VCO)
• Active inductor (AI)
• Wide tuning range
• Output power
• Phase noise
• Quality factor
• Tunable inductance

This paper presents a wide tuning range CMOS voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) with a high-tunable active inductor circuit. In this VCO circuit, the coarse frequency is achieved by tuning the integrated active inductor circuit. The VCO circuit is designed in 0.18 CMOS process and simulated with Cadence Spectra. The simulation results show the frequency tuning range from 120 MHz to 2 GHz resulting in a tuning range of 94 %. The phase noise variation is from 80 to 90 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz frequency offset, and output power variation is from 4.7 to 11.5 dBm. The active inductor power consumption is 2.2 mW and the total power dissipation is 7 mW from a 1.8 V DC power supply. By comparing the proposed VCO circuit with the general VCO topology, the results show that this VCO architecture by using the novel, high-tunable and low power active inductor circuit, presents a better performance regarding low chip size, low power consumption, high tuning range and high output power.

• 出版日期2014-11