Publication

Abstract : This work reports a CMOS based current reuse voltage controlled oscillator (VCO) using the design of ferrite integrated inductor on a three layered substrate in order to obtain lower phase noise and to improve the FOM of the VCO. This work is focused on improving Q-factor and L-density of the inductor that is to be used in the VCO by the enhancement of the magnetic properties of the inductor core, optimizing geometry of the core as well as conductor and by isolation of the substrate. It is observed that the proposed ferrite integrated inductor with field shield substrate layer improves the Q-factor by 53.8% and L-density by 78.1% as compared to air core inductor. The 65 nm CMOS based current reuse LC-VCO designed using the proposed inductor operates in the (2.27-2.79) GHz range. The proposed VCO exhibits lower phase noise of -115.96 dBc/Hz and -135.01 dBc/Hz at an offset of 1 MHz and 5 MHz respectively. Measurements show that the proposed VCO consumes a power of 2.85 mW from a supply of 1.1 V. This demonstrates that the proposed inductor can be beneficial for high performance RF ICs. © 2018 Academic Press. All rights reserved.