Beating the power limit of LC oscillators

Abstract

This paper presents a novel LC oscillator topology that requires lower minimum power for startup than other LC oscillators. The Gm-boosted LC oscillator topology introduced here can drop the power required to start an oscillation by 35% in a 0.18 mum CMOS process, without significant degradation in phase noise levels compared to a standard LC oscillator. Such an oscillator may be useful in low power, low noise communication transceivers.