A mm-wave 40 nm CMOS subharmonically injection-locked QVCO with lock detection

Abstract

This paper demonstrates a 40 nm CMOS mm-wave subharmonically injection-locked QVCO with a lock detection mechanism. The locking range is more than 2GHz over the 55-63 GHz tuning range. An envelope detector simplifies the calibration of the QVCO. In addition, the lock detector, based on passive mixing, detects the lock condition simply by a change in the DC operating point. The large locking range, the large tunability and the combination of envelope detector and lock detector offer a simple approach for robust mm-wave frequency synthesis based on subharmonic injection locking.