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Design Considerations for CMOS Voltage-Controlled Oscillators (VCOs)

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Transformer-Based Design Techniques for Oscillators and Frequency Dividers

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Abstract

Voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is one of the most critical building blocks in a phase-locked loop (PLL) since it needs to operate at the highest frequency and its phase-noise performance determines the out-of-band phase noise of the PLL at offset frequency larger than the loop bandwidth. Besides, the output frequency range covered by the PLL is also directly limited by the tuning range of the VCO.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The exact value of the maximum Vo should be 2(VDD − VD,MT), where VD,MT is the minimum drain voltage of MT. The maximum Vo approaches 2VDD for a large VDD.

  2. 2.

    As will be discussed later, the amplitude noise can also convert to phase noise if a varactor is employed for frequency tuning in a VCO.

  3. 3.

    Here the effect of AM-PM noise conversion is ignored for simplicity so that the flicker noise from the MT does not contribute to the phase noise, which is a well approximation as long as the varactor is kept small.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ECE department, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR

    Howard Cam Luong

  2. State Key Laboratory of Analog and Mixed-Signal VLSI, University of Macau, Taipa, Macau, China

    Jun Yin

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Luong, H.C., Yin, J. (2016). Design Considerations for CMOS Voltage-Controlled Oscillators (VCOs). In: Transformer-Based Design Techniques for Oscillators and Frequency Dividers. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15874-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15874-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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