A 16-nm FinFET Power- and Phase Noise-Scalable DCO using On-Chip Tapped Inductor

Abstract

In this paper a Digitally-Controlled Oscillator (DCO) with configurable power consumption and phase-noise is presented. The DCO provides two different power/phase-noise modes while maintaining an almost constant figure-of-merit (FoM) by using a tapped inductor in the LC tank. For each mode (low-power and low-noise mode) a different DCO core is selected, which either connects to the outer taps of the tank inductor or to the inner ones. The presented design achieves a tuning range of 25.9 % with a center frequency of 4.88 GHz at a FoM of approximately 185 dBc/Hz. The DCO concept is simulated in a 16 nm FinFET CMOS process.