A Tiny Quadrature Oscillator Using Low-Q Series LC Tanks

A new quadrature oscillator topology is proposed, which arranges four low-Q series LC tanks in a ring structure driven by inverters operating in class-D. With a very small area of 0.007 that is comparable to conventional ring oscillators, this oscillator has 7–20 dB better phase noise FoM of 177 dB. It is widely tunable for nearly an octave from 2.66 to 4.97 GHz.European Research Counci