A V-band VCO with on-chip body bias voltage control technique using 40-nm CMOS process

Abstract

This paper presents a V-band voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) implemented in 40-nm CMOS Process. The on-chip body bias voltage control technique is adopted to improve phase noise and stability of the output signal and to design an LC tank and output buffer circuitry that compensates for the process, voltage, and temperature variations. The design was fabricated in RF Mixed-signal CMOS process with die size 0.078 mm². Based on the silicon results, the proposed VCO achieve a phase noise of −86 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset. The VCO draws 17.8 mA current from a 1.2 V supply. Compared with the traditional structure VCO of the same batch, the measured figure of merit (FOM) is optimized from −165.4 to −169 dB. The novel VCO demonstrates better FOM performance compared to the traditional VCO structure. Moreover, the measured output signal power offset of novel VCO is reduced by 1.8 dBm, which will contribute to the improvement in the yield of chip manufacturing.

Keywords:

• V-band VCO
• low phase noise
• body bias voltage control
• PVT

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the RF circuit and system lab of Hangzhou Dianzi University for the testing supports.