A Ku-Band Low-Phase-Noise Wide-Tuning-Range VCO in SiGe BiCMOS Technology

Abstract

In this paper, design and fabrication of a Ku-band voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) using commercially available 0.18 μm SiGe BiCMOS technology is presented. To achieve the low phase noise, the VCO employs a g m-boosted configuration which is a combination of cross coupled VCO and balanced Colpitts VCO, and the VCO simultaneously achieves wide tuning range. The tested results show that the VCO exhibits a phase noise of-116.2 dBc/Hz at a 1 MHz offset and presents a tuning range from 12.82 GHz to 14.28 GHz. The overall dc current consumption of the VCO is 2.1 mA with a supply voltage 1.8 V. The chip area of the VCO is 0.92×0.91 mm 2 .

A 32 GHz Low-Power Low-Phase-Noise VCO Implemented in SiGe BiCMOS Technology

“…This is particularly important when simulating bipolar VCOs at millimeter-wave frequencies, the transistor model must capture selfheating and avalanche multiplication, which are two positive feedback phenomena that cause significant nonconvergence problems at large voltage swings. During the transient simulations, the impedance of the Sparameter signal source is set to a small value (i.e., [10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20], to clearly reflect the expected effective resistance of the tank inductance at the oscillation frequency, and thus to allow for the onset of oscillations to occur.…”