A 60 GHz Transformer Coupled Low Power Quadrature VCO using Ring Inductor

This paper presents a 60 GHz transformer coupled low power quadrature voltage-controlled oscillator (QVCO) using a single turn ring inductor. The single turn inductor is shared by the pair of oscillators. A digital cap bank is used for fine tuning of the oscillator. The circuit is designed in 65 nm CMOS process. The frequency of the oscillator is tuned from 59.5 to 60.5 GHz. The proposed 60 GHz QVCO exhibits a phase noise of −81 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz offset frequency. The DC power consumption is 3.3 mW with a supply voltage of 1 V. As per the authors’ knowledge, this work has the lowest DC power consumption and a competitive figure-of-merit with good quadrature accuracy compared to all other published millimeter wave CMOS QVCOs.