A Low Supply Voltage LC-VCO IC with a Drain Harmonic Tuned Filter in 40-nm SOI CMOS

A low-supply-voltage 15-GHz-band LC-VCO IC is presented in this paper to improve the phase noise and FoM performance. The proposed VCO IC adopts a drain harmonic tuned filter and an LC bias circuit to realize high load impedance at the third harmonics and to amplify carrier signal for improving the phase noise performance. The LC-VCO IC is designed, fabricated and fully evaluated on wafer in 40-nm SOI CMOS. The fabricated VCO IC has exhibited a measured phase noise of -132.0 dBc/Hz at 10-MHz offset frequency from the 15.58 GHz carrier frequency and a measured FoMT of -197.5 dBc/Hz with a supply voltage of 0.45 V.