A sub-100 /spl mu/W 1.9-GHz CMOS oscillator using FBAR resonator

The paper presents an ultra-low power CMOS oscillator using film bulk acoustic resonator (FBAR). The 1.9-GHz oscillator consumes 89 /spl mu/W from a low supply voltage of 430 mV and achieves an excellent phase-noise performance of -98 dBc/Hz, -120 dBc/Hz and -138 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz, 100 kHz and 1 MHz offset, respectively. The oscillator is implemented in a standard 130 nm CMOS process and packaged using chip-on-board techniques. Compared with other state-of-the-art oscillators, this oscillator has the best figure-of-merit (Ham, D. et al., IEEE J. Solid State Circuits, vol.36, no.6, p.896-909, 2001). To the authors' knowledge, this is the first sub-100 /spl mu/W GHz-range oscillator reported.

I. Introduction

Gigahertz range oscillators are essential building blocks in today's communication, computing and networking systems. These applications require a small form factor, low cost, low power and low phase noise oscillator. For example, in wireless sensor networks, the average power of the sensor node needs to be 100'Sof to enable energy scavenging while its size has to be [2].