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A High-Q Floating Active Inductor Based VCO for L-Band and Lower C-Band Applications in 180 nm CMOS Technology

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Abstract

This paper presents a low power, wide-tuned Inductor-capacitor (LC) voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO). A floating active inductor (FAI) with a high-quality factor (Q) is used in the VCO design. The FAI is designed with a cascode transistor pair and a cross-coupled transistor pair to achieve a high Q value of up to 3290. The inductance value of the FAI ranges from 12.5 nH to 256.2 nH. The VCO has 164.8% of oscillation frequency tuning, from 235 MHz to 2.83 GHz with a phase noise of −85.3 dBc/Hz to −102.4 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency. The FAI and VCO have 17.1 × 18 µm2 and 58.6 × 64.6 µm2 silicon area respectively. The power consumption ranges from 6.8 mW to 8.62 mW within the frequency tuning range. The FAI and VCO are designed in UMC 0.18 µm mixed-mode CMOS technology.

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All authors contributed equally to the study conception and design. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Kriangkrai Sooksood.

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Hota, A.K., Sethi, K., Sooksood, K. et al. A High-Q Floating Active Inductor Based VCO for L-Band and Lower C-Band Applications in 180 nm CMOS Technology. J. Inst. Eng. India Ser. B 104, 1023–1033 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40031-023-00910-2

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