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A low-power voltage-controlled oscillator with current-switched technique

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Abstract

A low-power voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with current-switched technique is presented. The circuit is implemented in 0.18-μm CMOS technology. In the design, a large inductor is used for low-power and low-phase-noise application, whereas a switched capacitor bank and two pairs of MOS varactors are adopted for coarse tuning and fine tuning respectively. The proposed VCO is biased at the boundary of the current and voltage limited region for a good trade-off between power consumption and phase noise. The phase noise of the proposed VCO is reduced in each sub-band by a current-switched technique, and a phase noise improvement of as much as 2.75 dB has been achieved. The proposed VCO has a measured tuning range of 15.2 % from 4.34 to 5.05 GHz and dissipates an average power of 3.78 mW at 1.2 V supply voltage, whereas its measured phase noise and figure of merit FOMT are −113.0 dBc/Hz and −183.7 at 1 MHz offset from the frequency of 4.36 GHz respectively.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen, China

    Zhixiong Sheng & Fengqi Yu

  2. Institute of Microelectronics of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zhixiong Sheng

  3. The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Zhixiong Sheng & Fengqi Yu

  4. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zhixiong Sheng

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  1. Zhixiong Sheng
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  2. Fengqi Yu
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Correspondence to Zhixiong Sheng.

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Sheng, Z., Yu, F. A low-power voltage-controlled oscillator with current-switched technique. Analog Integr Circ Sig Process 76, 103–110 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-013-0081-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10470-013-0081-3

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