Design, simulate and layout of a 60GHz voltage-controlled oscillator

Abstract

In this report, the design of Gm-boosting differential Colpitts voltage-controlled oscillator is fully explored. The goal of this final year project is to design a 60GHz VCO with wide tuning range (~ 7GHz) and low phase noise, while maintaining low power consumption.

The proposed Colpitts oscillator topology exhibits better phase noise characteristics and requires a less stringent start-up condition as compared to conventional Colpitts oscillator. This proposed Gm-boosting topology allows larger output oscillation amplitude and is able to suppress AM-to-PM conversion by the switching transistor. The proposed VCO is implemented in 65nm CMOS for 54.3-59.25GHz operation. To evaluate the design, a conventional NMOS cross-coupling VCO, a noise-filtering VCO, a wide-band VCO with fine/coarse varactor tuning and the proposed VCO are simulated with 1.2V supply voltage. Biased with a supply voltage of 1.2V, the phase noise performance of proposed topology is of -98.4 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset, which is 6.66 dBc/Hz better than that of the cross-coupled differential LC VCO.