A switched-capacitor mm-wave VCO in 65 nm digital CMOS

Abstract

A 34-40 GHz VCO fabricated in 65 nm digital CMOS technology is demonstrated in this paper. The VCO uses a combination of switched capacitors and varactors for tuning and has a maximum Kvco of 240 MHz/V. It exhibits a phase noise of better than -98 dBc/Hz @ 1-MHz offset across the band while consuming 12 mA from a 1.2-V supply, an FOM <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">T</sub> of -182.1 dBc/Hz. A cascode buffer following the VCO consumes 11 mA to deliver 0 dBm LO signal to a 50Ω load.