Design of Low Phase Noise SIPC based Complementary LC-QVCO for IEEE 802.11a Application

The paper presents the design of a source injection parallel coupled (SIPC) quadrature voltage controlled oscillator (QVCO), realized in a complementary architecture, which is usually preferred in low-power applications as it exploits ≈50% bias current reduction with double efficiency compared to the structure with single coupled, when operating in the current-limited regime. A stacked spiral inductor exhibiting a Q factor of 5.8, with pMOS based depletion mode varactor of 32% in tuning range, corresponding to 3.2-3.6GHz of tuning frequency, is implemented in 0.18µm CMOS technology. The phase noise of the SIPC QVCO architecture simulated at 1MHz of offset frequency is indicated to be -114.3dBc/Hz, while dissipating 11.0mW of core circuit power.