A 57.9-to-68.3GHz 24.6mW frequency synthesizer with in-phase injection-coupled QVCO in 65nm CMOS

• Main Authors: Yi, Xiang, Boon, Chirn Chye, Liu, Hang, Lin, Jia Fu, Ong, Jian Cheng, Lim, Wei Meng
• Other Authors: School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/105598; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/16605; http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ISSCC.2013.6487767
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Under the influence of increasing demand for high-data-rate communication systems such as 60GHz band applications, the requirements of PLLs keep getting higher. In a mm-Wave direct-conversion transceiver, the quadrature LO signal generation is challenging. The conventional techniques to generate quadrature LO signals suffer from many problems. The method of using a divide-by-2 divider after a VCO with double LO frequency is popular in multi-GHz designs, but it is difficult to be realized at mm-Wave frequencies. Employing passive RC complex filters is another way to generate quadrature signals, but high power is required to compensate its loss. The conventional parallel-coupled QVCO seems to be a good choice for mm-Wave application. However, the approach suffers from poor phase noise. This work presents a fully integrated 57.9-to-68.3GHz frequency synthesizer, which employs an in-phase injection-coupled QVCO (IPIC-QVCO) to produce low-phase-noise quadrature signals with low power.