80 GHz VCO with Slow-wave Coplanar Stripline Synthesized Differential Inductor

摘要

This paper presents the design of a mm-wave VCO with high quality factor slow-wave coplanar stripline synthesized inductor. The objective is to show the advantage of using slow-wave coplanar stripline to improve the figure of merit. For that purpose, the proposed VCO is compared to its classical LC-tank VCO counterpart in the same technology. Both VCOs use same varactors and are designed for center frequency of 80 GHz in BiCMOS 55 nm technology. Due to high quality factor (≈38) of slow-wave coplanar stripline, the phase noise is 6 dB better and power consumption is 30% lower than classical LC-tank VCO. The slow-wave coplanar stripline based VCO also achieved 17% higher frequency tuning range. The measured phase noise is -112 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset for the proposed VCO with power consumption of 6.3 mW and output power of -3 dBm.