A 75.7GHz to 102GHz rotary-traveling-wave VCO by tunable composite right /left hand T-line

• Main Authors: Ma, Shunli, Fei, Wei, Yu, Hao, Ren, Junyan
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Electronic circuits
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/100927; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/18225
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the use of tunable composite-right/left-hand (CRLH) transmission line (T-line), this paper provides a wide frequency-tuning-range (FTR) mechanism for Mobius-ring rotary-traveling-wave (RTW) VCO in millimeter-wave region. CRLH T-line is implemented in RTW-VCO with inductor-loaded transformer to realize sub-band selection over a wide FTR. Each sub-band is further covered by a varactor for fine-tuning. The chip was fabricated in GF 65nm RF-CMOS process with area of 0.08mm2. The measured results show a current consumption of 14mA under supply voltage of 1V, a tuning range of 29.5% with center frequency at 89.3GHz, and a phase noise from -100.08dBc/Hz to -98.7dBc/Hz with 10MHz offset. A state-of-art figure-of-merit FOMT of -177.78dBc/Hz is demonstrated.