Self-Biased and Tail Current Switching LC-VCO in CMOS Technology

Abstract

This paper presents an LC-VCO with a novel self-biased tail current switching. The proposed biasing method leads to reduce the phase noise of the LC-VCO when compared with the conventional biasing tail currents that implemented using a constant nMOS/pMOS current mirror. The proposed LC-VCO is designed in TSMC 0.18-μm standard technology to cover the specified applications in the 2.4 GHz frequency band. The designs implementation is done in cadence-virtuoso CAD tool. Simulation results of the proposed LC-VCO reveals that the phase noise reduced more than 4 dBc/Hz and 6 dBc/Hz at offset frequencies of 100 Hz and 10 KHz, respectively when compared with the conventional tail current. The maximum power consumption of the LC-VCO is 1 mW.