A K-band LC Voltage Controlled Oscillator in 65-nm CMOS technology

This paper presents a K-band LC voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) in 65-nm CMOS technology. The VCO includes an LC resonator, a cross-coupled NMOSFET pair, an LC tank, two buffer amplifiers, and a driver amplifier. The cross-coupled NMOSFET pair is used to provide the negative resistance, the LC resonator is used to determine the oscillation frequency, and the amplifiers are employed to improve the output power. Measured results show that, the proposed VCO can be turned from 22.7 to 25.8 GHz with an output power of 5.4 to 7.2 dBm. The measured phase noise is -99.54 dBc/Hz@1 MHz offset at the oscillation frequency of 24.02 GHz. With 1 V supply voltage, the DC power consumption of the VCO is only 9 mW, excluding the amplifiers.