Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

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

Circuits, Systems, and Signal Processing volume 41, pages 2522–2540 (2022)Cite this article

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.

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.

Access options

Buy single article

Instant access to the full article PDF.

USD 39.95

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8

Availability of data and material

Data can be available on request to corresponding author.

References

  1. D. Balodi, V. Arunima, P.A. Govindacharyulu, Low power LC-voltage controlled oscillator with −140 dBc/Hz @ 1 MHz offset using on-chip inductor design in 0.13 mm RF-CMOS process for S-Band application. Circuit World 46(1), 32–41 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. D. Balodi, V. Arunima, P.A. Govindacharyulu, Ultra-wideband quadrature LC-VCO using capacitor-bank and backgate topology with on-chip spirally stacked inductor in 0.13 µm RF-CMOS process covering S-C bands. Microelectron. J. 99, 104727 (2020)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. F. Behbahani, Y. Kishigami, J. Leete, A.A. Abidi, CMOS mixers and polyphase filters for large image rejection. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits. 36(6), 873–887 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. J. Chang, A. Abidi, M. Gaitan, Large suspended inductors on silicon and their use in a 2-μm CMOS RF amplifier. IEEE Electron Device Lett. 14(5), 246–248 (1993)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. H. Djahanshahi, C.A.T. Salama, Robust two-stage current-controlled oscillator in submicrometre CMOS. Electron. Lett. 35(21), 1837–1839 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. J.P. Hong, S.-J. Yun, N.-J. Oh, S.-G. Lee, A 2.2-mW backgate coupled LC quadrature VCO with current reused structure. IEEE Microwave Wirel. Compon. Lett. 17(4), 298–300 (2007)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. J.W. Shin, J.S. Kim, S.S. Kim, J.K. Choi, A wideband Fractional-N frequency synthesizer with linearized coarse-tuned VCO for UHF/VHF mobile broadcasting tuners. in IEEE Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference Digitial, pp. 440–443 (2007)

  8. M.K.Q. Jooq, A. Bozorgmehr, S. Mirzakuchaki, A low-power delay stage ring VCO based on wrap-gate CNTFET technology for X-band satellite communication applications. Int. J. Circuit Theory Appl. 49(1), 142–158 (2021)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. J.H. Kim, A. Tazarv, M.M. Green, Fast Startup of LC VCOs Using Circuit Asymmetries. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst.—Express Briefs 64(10), 1172–1176 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. S. Li, I. Kipnis, M. Ismail, A 10-GHz CMOS quadrature LC-VCO for multirate optical applications. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 38(10), 1626–1634 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. H. Matsuoka, T. Tsukahara, A 5-GHz frequency-doubling quadrature modulator with a ring-type local oscillator. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 34(9), 1345–1348 (1999)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Y.J. Moon, Y.-S. Roh, C.-Y. Jeong, C. Yoo, A 4.39–5.26 GHz LC-tank CMOS voltage controlled oscillator with small VCO-gain variation. IEEE Microwave Wireless Comp. Lett. 19(8), 524–526 (2009)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. A. Nasri, S. Toofan, M. Estebsari, A. Estebsari, Design of a 41.14–48.11 GHz triple frequency based VCO. Electronics 8(5), 529 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. M.A. Poor, O. Esmaeeli, S. Sheikhaei, A low phase noise quadrature VCO using superharmonic injection, current reuse, and negative resistance techniques in CMOS technology. Analog Integrated Circuits Signal Process. 99(3), 633–644 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. W. Robins, Phase Noise in Signal Sources/Theory and Applications/Book, vol. 8 (Peter Peregrinus, Ltd, London, 1982)

    Google Scholar 

  16. A. Rofougaran et al., A single-chip 900-MHz spread-spectrum wireless transceiver in 1 µm CMOS –Part I: architecture and transmitter design. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 33(4), 515–534 (1998)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. S. Badel and Yusuf Leblebici, Breaking the power-delay tradeoff: design of low-power high-speed MOS current-mode logic circuits operating with reduced supply voltage. in IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems. pp. 1871–1874 (2007)

  18. S. Gan, Yuan Wang, Jian Cao, Song Jia, Xing Zhang, A 4.9–6.9 GHz LC VCO with low-phase-noise. in IEEE International Conference of Electron Devices and Solid-State Circuits. pp. 1–2 (2013)

  19. A.H.M. Shirazi, A. Nikpaik, R. Molavi, S. Lightbody, H. Djahanshahi, M. Taghivand, S. Mirabbasi, S. Shekhar, On the design of mm-wave self-mixing-VCO architecture for high tuning-range and low phase noise. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 51(5), 1210–1222 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. M.S.J. Steyaert, J. Janssens, B. De Muer et al., A 2-V CMOS cellular transceiver front-end. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 35(12), 1895–1907 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. F. Ullah, Y. Liu, Z. Li, X. Wang, M.M. Sarfraz, H. Zhang, A Bandwidth-enhanced differential LC-voltage controlled oscillator (LC-VCO) and superharmonic coupled quadrature VCO for K-band applications. Electronics 7(8), 127 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Q. Wan, J. Dong, H. Zhou, F. Yu, A very low power quadrature VCO with modified current-reuse and back-gate coupling topology. J. Circuits Syst. Comput. 26(11), 1750184 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. C.Z. Wang, J.X. Chen, W.F. Liang, P.P. Yan, J.F. Zhai, W. Hong, Linear CMOS LC-VCO Based on triple-coupled inductors and its application to 40-GHz phase-locked loop. IEEE Trans. Microw. Theory Tech. 65(8), 2977–2989 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. N. Xi, F. Lin, T. Ye, A low phase noise, high phase accuracy quadrature LC-VCO with dual-tail current biasing to insert reconfigurable phase delay. IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. II Express Briefs 67(3), 450–454 (2019)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. H. Yoon, Y. Lee, Y. Lim, G.-Y. Tak, H.-T. Kim, Y.-C. Ho, J. Choi, A 0.56–2.92 GHz wideband and low phase noise quadrature LO-generator using a single LC-VCO for 2G–4G multistandard cellular transceivers. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits 51(3), 614–625 (2016)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. A. Zolfaghari, B. Razavi, A low-power 2.4 GHz transmitter/receiver CMOS IC. IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits. 38(2), 176–183 (2003)

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Funding

Not applicable.

Author information

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
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Deepak Balodi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Neeraj Kumar Misra
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

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.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Neeraj Kumar Misra.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

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

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

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

Keywords

search

Navigation