High-Efficiency Millimeter-wave Single-ended and Differential Fundamental Oscillators in CMOS

Abstract

This paper reports an approach to designing compact high efficiency millimeter-wave fundamental oscillators operating above the fmax/2 of the active device. The approach takes full consideration of the nonlinearity of the active device and the finite quality factor of the passive devices to provide an accurate and optimal oscillator design in terms of the output power and efficiency. The 213-GHz single-ended and differential fundamental oscillators in 65-nm CMOS technology are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Using a compact capacitive transformer design, the single-ended oscillator achieves 0.79-mW output power per transistor (16 µm) at 1.0-V supply and a peak dc-to-RF efficiency of 8.02% (VDD=0.80 V) within a core area of 0.0101 mm 2 , and the measured phase noise is −93.4 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset. The differential oscillator exhibits approximately the same performance. A 213-GHz fundamental voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with bulk tuning method is also developed in this work. The measured peak efficiency of the VCO is 6.02% with a tuning rang of 2.3% at 0.6-V supply.

Performance Investigation of Different Topologies of 1-100 GHz on-chip Transformers using 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS

“…On-chip transformer (TF) is one of the passive components for designing system-onchip (SoC) applications. On-chip TF has been commonly used as a power splitter/combiner, and inter-stage impedance matching in many components design such as power amplifiers [5][6][7], low noise amplifiers [8,9], mixers [10], and voltage controlled oscillators [11][12][13]. The TF is better to be compact, low loss, with high quality factor, easy impedance matching, and with the ability of conversion from differential to single ended for power combining as well as conversion from single ended to differential for power splitting [14].…”