A Wide-band High-performance Voltage-controlled Oscillator for 5G IoT Wireless Communication

A low phase noise and power-efficient class-B/C hybrid voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) is presented for applying to 5G Internet of Things (IoT) wireless communication in this paper. The proposed three sets of switch capacitor array (SCA) are adopted first to widen the bandwidth by dividing the VCO output into eight overlapped frequency bands while maintaining the flexible frequency tuning. Then a multiple bias variable capacitor array (VCA) is designed to realize the fine-grain tuning of output frequency, which also improves the linearity within frequency-voltage tuning, the curvature variation in tunable gain, while minimizes the phase noise and stabilize tuning control on output frequency. After circuit implementation based on 180nm/1.2V CMOS standard process, the post-layout simulation results demonstrate that the proposed VCO achieves a wide frequency output from 4.63 GHz to 5.13 GHz, with consuming a total consumption of 0.19 mW at 1.2 V power supply voltage. The key phase noise is -115.1 dBc/Hz@1MHz on the 4.82 GHz center frequency, and the figure of merit (FoM) value can reach up to -195.6 dBc/Hz, which can surpass the performance to comparable similar class VCO design cases.