Millimeter-wave voltage-controlled oscillators in 0.13pm CMOS technology

Abstract—This paper describes the design of CMOS millimeter-wave voltage controlled oscillators. Varactor, transistor, and in-ductor designs are optimized to reduce the parasitic capacitances. An investigation of tradeoff between quality factor and tuning range for MOS varactors at 24 GHz has shown that the polysilicon gate lengths between 0.18 and 0.24 m result both good quality factor ( 12) and max min ratio ( 3) in the 0.13- m CMOS process used for the study. The components were utilized to realize a VCO operating around 60 GHz with a tuning range of 5.8 GHz. A 99-GHz VCO with a tuning range of 2.5 GHz, phase noise of 102.7 dBc/Hz at 10-MHz offset and power consumption of 7–15 mW from a 1.5-V supply and a 105-GHz VCO are also demonstrated. This is the CMOS circuit with the highest funda-mental operating frequency. The lumped element approach can be used even for VCOs operating near 100-GHz and it results a smaller circuit area. Index Terms—CMOS, lumped model, millimeter wave, MOS varactor, quality factor, transmission line, voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO)