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Low Power LC-Quadrature VCO with Superior Phase Noise Performance in 0.13 µm RF-CMOS Process for Modern WLAN Application

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Abstract

The presented work intends to encounter the challenge of optimizing frequency tracking in the C-band WLAN spectrum, with a tuning range and phase noise (PN) performance. A Quadrature Voltage Controlled Oscillator (QVCO) design in 130 nm CMOS technology has been presented to cover the most sought WLAN/WiFi spectrum of modern wireless systems, employing the current reuse technique and an on-chip inductor implementation. To provide better compensation of LC losses at reduced power dissipation, a cross-coupled structure combining NMOS and PMOS has been used. We have run an extensive simulation using the industry-standard ADS (Keysight technology) platform. The simulation study attributed to the superior phase noise performance of − 160 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz (near fmax) at a power dissipation of 6.52 mW from 1.2 V supply. With the moderate voltage tuning range, the entire desired frequency span of 5.400–5.495 GHz was obtained with a fairly high resolution of 2.375 MHz/1 mV, which allows serving a larger crowd for this spectrum. A fairly moderate VCO gain along with the obtained phase noise and power dissipation provides a well-established Figure of Merit (FOM) of − 187 dB. Finally, a comparison study in terms of power dissipation, phase noise, tuning range, voltage tuning, and Kvco is performed to demonstrate that the provided work is considerably more significant than traditional efforts.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Integral University, Lucknow, India

    Imran Ullah Khan

  2. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Babu Banarasi Das Engineering College, Lucknow, India

    Deepak Balodi

  3. Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Bharat Institute of Engineering and Technology, Hyderabad, 501510, India

    Neeraj Kumar Misra

Authors
  1. Imran Ullah Khan
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  2. Deepak Balodi
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  3. Neeraj Kumar Misra
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Contributions

IUK involved in conceptualization, methodology, software, writing. DB participated in data curation, project administration, validation. NKM: involved in conceptualization, methodology, software, visualization, writing—review and editing, validation, supervision, original draft.

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Correspondence to Neeraj Kumar Misra.

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Khan, I.U., Balodi, D. & Misra, N.K. Low Power LC-Quadrature VCO with Superior Phase Noise Performance in 0.13 µm RF-CMOS Process for Modern WLAN Application. Circuits Syst Signal Process 41, 2522–2540 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-021-01921-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-021-01921-4

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