A 0.23 mW self-biased current-reuse CMOS LC-VCO based on novel interposed network

Abstract

Based on the self-biased current-reuse complementary structure and interposed network, a low power LC voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) is presented, which can simultaneously achieve ultra-low power consumption and low phase noise. Firstly, thanks to the self-biased voltage-diving technique, the LC-VCO consumes ultra-low power consumption. Secondly, the novel interposed network can greatly improve the VCO’s phase noise performance. The proposed VCO is implemented in SMIC 180 nm CMOS process with a small area of 0.15 mm², which exhibits phase noise of −118.3 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset from the 2.5 GHz carrier at 0.8 V supply voltage while the power dissipation is only 0.23 mW.