High-Efficiency Millimeter-wave Single-ended and Differential
Fundamental Oscillators in CMOS
Abstract
This paper reports an approach to designing compact high efficiency
millimeter-wave fundamental oscillators operating above the fmax=2 of
the active device. The approach takes full consideration of the
nonlinearity of the active device and the finite quality factor of the
passive devices to provide an accurate and optimal oscillator design in
terms of the output power and efficiency. The 213-GHz single-ended and
differential fundamental oscillators in 65-nm CMOS technology are
presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Using
a compact capacitive transformer design, the single-ended oscillator
achieves 0.79-mW output power per transistor (16 μm) at 1.0-V supply and
a peak dc-to-RF efficiency of 8.02% (VDD=0.80 V) within a core area of
0.0101mm2, and the measured phase noise is -93:4 dBc/Hz at 1-MHz offset.
The differential oscillator exhibits approximately the same performance.
A 213-GHz fundamental voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with bulk
tuning method is also developed in this work. The measured peak
efficiency of the VCO is 6.02% with a tuning rang of 2.3% at 0.6-V
supply.