A 184.6-dBc/Hz FoM 100-kHz Flicker Phase Noise Corner 30-GHz Rotary Traveling-Wave Oscillator Using Distributed Stubs in 22-nm FD-SOI

Abstract

A rotary traveling-wave oscillator (RTWO) has an ability to generate multiple phases at millimeter-wave (mmW) frequencies while achieving low phase noise (PN). Unfortunately, due to transmission line (TL) dispersion, RTWOs suffer from flicker noise upconversion. In this letter, we propose a "distributed stubs" technique to mitigate this mechanism. To cancel out phase shifts due to the TL dispersion, we intentionally generate a phase difference between TL modes. The proposed 26.2–30 GHz RTWO is implemented in 22-nm FD-SOI CMOS. At 30 GHz, it achieves PN of − 107 and −128.1 dBc/Hz at 1 and MHz 10 offsets, respectively. This translates into figure-of-merits (FoM) of 183.5 and 184.6 dBc/Hz, respectively. The proposed architecture consumes 20 mW from 0.8-V supply. It achieves a flicker noise corner of 100 kHz, which is an order-of-magnitude better than currently achievable by state-of-the-art mmW RTWOs.