Design of low-phase-noise CMOS transformer-based gate-coupled quadrature VCO

A low-phase-noise transformer-based gate-coupled quadrature voltagecontrolled oscillator (TGC-QVCO) using 0.13 μm CMOS technology is presented. The TGC-QVCO consumes 7 mW at 1 V power supply with 18% frequency tuning. The measured phase noise at 1 MHz offset varies from about -122 to -119 dBc/Hz for frequency tuning from 1.34 to 1.6 GHz. The achieved figure of merit (FoM) is 179 dB and the chip area is 800 × 900 μm². © The Institution of Engineering and Technology 2014.