Design Issues of CMOS VCO for RF Transceivers

This paper describes CMOS VCO circuit design procedures and techniques for multi-band/multi-standard RF transceivers. The proposed techniques enable a 4 GHz CMOS VCO to satisfy all requirements for Quad-band GSMIEDGE and WCDMA standards by achieving a good trade-off among important specifications, phase noise, power consumption, modulation performance, and chip area efficiency. To meet the very stringent GSM T/Rx phase noise and wide frequency range specifications, the VCO utilizes bond-wire inductors with high-quality factor, an 8-bit coarse tune capbank for low VCO gain(30$\sim$50 MHz/V) and an on-chip $2^{nd}$ harmonic noise filter. The proposed VCO is implemented in $0.13{\mu}m$ CMOS technology. The measured tuning range is about 34 %(3.17 to 4.49 GHz). The VCO exhibits a phase noise of -123 dBc/Hz at 400 kHz offset and -145 dBc/Hz at 3 MHz offset from a 900 MHz carrier after LO chain. The calculated figure of merit(FOM) is -183.5 dBc/Hz at 3 MHz offset. This fully integrated VCO occupies $0.45{\times}0.9\;mm^2$.