A 10 GHz CMOS distributed voltage controlled oscillator

Abstract

A 10 GHz CMOS distributed voltage controlled oscillator (DVCO) is designed in a 0.35 /spl mu/m BiCMOS process technology using only CMOS transistors. The oscillator achieves a tuning range of 12% (9.3 GHz to 10.5 GHz) and a phase noise of -114 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from a carrier frequency of 10.2 GHz. The VCO uses two different simultaneous tuning techniques which allow for a coarse and fine tuning of frequency in a frequency synthesizer. The oscillator provides an output power of -7 dBm without any buffering, drawing 14 mA of DC current from a 2.5 V power supply.