Design of Voltage Controlled Oscillator Based On Active Inductor For RF Receiver Front End

For high frequency applications active inductor based designs are preferred because they take up less space than conventional inductors. In this paper the design of a voltage-controlled oscillator with an active inductor which can be used for RF receiver front end is presented. A Voltage controlled oscillator implemented using an active inductor with a high operating frequency is shown in this work. This design can be used to generate a carrier signal at the front end of an RF receiver. Cadence virtuoso is used to simulate a VCO based on an active inductor utilising UMC 180nm technology. Cadence Virtuoso's Spectre RF is used to run postlayout simulations. This voltage-controlled oscillator has a tuning range of 912 MHz to 2.14 GHz, making it appropriate for the design of multi-band transceivers. The phase noise measured at a frequency range of 1 MHz is −91.43 dBc/Hz. VCO occupies a low area of
$62.4 \times 53.5 \mu\ m^{2}$
. The constructed VCO's simulation results can be compared to other designs present in the literature.