A symmetrical 6-GHz fully integrated cascode coupling CMOS LC quadrature VCO

Abstract

A fully symmetrical integrated quadrature LC oscillator with a wide tuning range of 1.2GHz is presented. The quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) is implemented using a symmetrical coupling method which has been used to produce the large tuning range with a low control voltage and to achieve good phase noise performance in 0.18μm complementary metal oxide semiconductor technology. The measured phase noise at 1MHz offset from the center frequency (5.5GHz) is -115 dBc/Hz. The QVCO draws 3.2mA from a 1.8V supply. The equivalent phase error between I and Q signal was at most 0.5/spl deg/.