A Wide Frequency Tuning Range Active-Inductor Voltage-Controlled Oscillator for Ultra Wideband Applications

Dominic DiClemente and Fei Yuan Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Ryerson University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada Email:fyuan@ee.ryerson.ca

AbstractThis paper presents a new active inductor LCtank voltage-controlled oscillator with an ultra wide frequency tuning range. The large frequency tuning range is obtained by varying the inductance of the active inductor. Two inductance tuning mechanisms, namely the wide-band tuning mechanism for coarse frequency adjustment over a large frequency range for band selection and the primary tuning mechanism for the ne frequency tuning in frequency synthesis, are introduced. The proposed oscillator was designed and implemented in TSMC0.18m 1.8V 6-metal 1-poly CMOS technology. The oscillator occupies a small active area of 85 50 m2 . The wide-band tuning mechanism provides a frequency tuning range from 0.2 GHz to 6.5 GHz while the primary tuning mechanism provides a frequency range from 1.4 GHz to 1.7 GHz when the center frequency of the oscillator is set to 1.6 GHz. The phase noise with the VCO tuned to 1.6 GHz is -118.5 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz frequency offset.

namely the wide-band tuning mechanism for coarse frequency adjustment over a large frequency range for band selection and the primary tuning mechanism for the ne frequency tuning in frequency synthesis, are introduced. The absence of spiral inductors signicantly reduces the silicon consumption of the oscillator and the tunability of the quality factor of the active inductor using two negative inductors results in good phase noise performance. This paper is organized as follows. Section II provides the details of the active inductor, the proposed LCtank VCO and its two proposed frequency tuning mechanisms. Section III provides the simulation results of the proposed VCO, the layout and the micro photo of the fabricated VCO. The paper is concluded in Section IV. II. P ROPOSED U LTRA W IDE - BAND VCO A. Gyrator-C Floating CMOS Active Inductors Active inductors synthesized using active devices offer the advantages of a tunable inductance, and a small silicon area over their spiral counterparts. Two back-to-back connected transconductors, known as gyrators, with one port terminated with a capacitive load, as shown in Fig.1, exhibit an inductive characteristic at the other port. It can be shown that when the input impedance of the gyrators is innite, the admittance looking into port 1 of the gyrator is given by Y (s) = sC2 + Go2 + 1 s
C1 gm1 gm2

I. I NTRODUCTION The ever increasing growth of the wireless communication market has lead to multiple wireless standards. These multiple standards can co-exist within the same frequency band or span across a large frequency spectrum. It is highly desirable to reuse existing hardware for multiple standards. To accomplish this a Voltage-Controlled Oscillator (VCO) with a large frequency tuning range is essential. The inherent frequency selective nature of LC-tank oscillators allows these oscillators to exhibit better phase noise performance over ring oscillators. Several mechanisms exist to tune the oscillation frequency of LC-tank oscillators with varactors the most widely used. The tuning range of the capacitance of a varactor is limited by the ratio of the capacitance of the varactor to the total capacitance at the node to which the varactor is connected. The typical frequency tuning range of varactor LC-tank VCOs is less than 30%. For a single VCO to be used for multiple bands a frequency tuning range of over 70% is often required. Although the frequency tuning range of LC-tank oscillators can be increased by employing digitally switched capacitor arrays, this is at the cost of increased hardware complexity and silicon consumption. This paper proposes an active inductor LC-tank voltage-controlled oscillator with an ultra wide frequency tuning range. The large frequency tuning range is obtained by varying the inductance of the active inductor. Two inductance tuning mechanisms,

Go1 gm1 gm2

(1)

Eq.(1) can be represented equivalently by the RLC network shown in Fig.1 with Rp = Rs =
1 Go2 , Go1 gm1 gm2 ,

Cp = C2 , C1 L = gm1 gm2 .

(2)

It is seen that a large inductance can be obtained by lowering gm1 and gm2 . This, however, has a negative impact on the parasitic series resistance Rs . To nd out the effective frequency range over which the gyrator is inductive, we examine the impedance of the inductor Z(s) = Rs Cp L s2 + s
L s Rs + 1 1 Rp Cp

Rs L

Rp +Rs Rp Cp L

(3)

978-1-4244-3828-0/09/$25.00 2009 IEEE

2097

g m1(V - V- ) +

Y(s) C2 Go2 Go1 C1 Y(s) Rp Cp

Rs

M1 M2

Vb1

M4 M5

g m2(V - V- ) +

M3 M6 1 M7 M9 M8 M10 Vb2 2

Fig. 1. Conguration of oating gyrator-C active inductors. Go1 and C1 are the output conductance of gyrator 1 and the input capacitance of gyrator 2, respectively. The same applies to Go2 and C2 .

m1,2 where Rp Rs was utilized and t1,2 = C1,2 is the cut-off frequency of the gyrators. Observe that Z(s) has a zero at frequency z = Rs = Go1 . The Bode plots of Z(j) are L C1 sketched in Fig.1. It is evident that the gyrator is resistive when < z , inductive when z < < o , and capacitive when > o .

When complex conjugate poles are encountered, the 1 impedance has its resonant frequency o LCp = t1 t2 ,
g

M11

M12

Fig. 3.

Schematic of proposed VCO.

|Z(j w)| (dB) Rs R p R s +Rp

20 dB/dec. -20 dB/dec.

The inductance of the active inductor is given by Leq = 2(Cgs3 + Cgs2 ) gds1 (2gm3 + gm2 gds1 ) (5)

wz Resistive Inductive

wo Capacitive

Z(j w) (Degree) 90

It is evident that the inductance is dependent of gm2 , gm3 , and gds1 . Although the inductance of the active inductor can be tuned by varying these parameters, the most convenient means is to vary Vb1 , which will in turn tune gds1,4 . C. Frequency Tuning Mechanisms

45 deg./dec.

-90 deg./dec. 0 -90 wz wo w

Fig. 2.

Bode plots of gyrator-C active inductors.

B. Proposed Ultra Wide-band VCO The proposed ultra wide-band VCO is a fully differential active inductor LC-tank oscillator utilizing the active inductor proposed by Lu et al [5]. Lu active inductor is a differentially congured gyrator-C active inductor. The input gyrator is a pair of pseudo-differential common gate ampliers composed of M1,3,4,6 and the output gyrator is a pair of source followers consisting of M2,5 . A negative resistor network is formed by the cross-coupled pair M11,12 to compensate for the resistive loss of the active inductor. Transistors M1,4 are biased in the triode and behave as a pair of voltage-controlled resistors whose resistance is controlled by Vb1 . It can be shown that the differential input impedance of the active inductor (looking into nodes 1 and 2) is given by Zin = Vin 2[s(Cgs3 + Cgs2 ) gm3 + gds1 ] = iin gds1 [gm3 + gm2 + s(Cgs3 + Cgs2 )] (4)

The schematic of the proposed ultra wide-band VCO is shown in Fig.3. A negative resistor formed by M11,12 is employed to cancel out the resistive loss of the LC tank formed by Lu active inductor and the capacitance of the devices. Two frequency tuning mechanisms are utilized. The rst tuning mechanism, called the wide-band tuning mechanism, tunes the oscillation frequency of the oscillator by varying Vb1 , which in turn tunes gds1,4 . The frequency tuning range obtained from varying Vb1 is shown in Fig.4. It is seen that Vb1 provides the frequency range from 0.2 GHz to 6.5 GHz. This large frequency tuning range allows both band selection and the effective compensation for PVT variations. The frequency sensitivity of the wide-band tuning mechanism, however, is not suitable for closed-loop locking of frequency synthesis. To obtain the tuning sensitivity that is more appropriate for closed-loop frequency locking, the second frequency tuning mechanism called the primary frequency tuning mechanism that provides a ne frequency tuning sensitivity is needed. The primary frequency tuning element is composed of M7,8,9,10 . Vb2 controls the inductance of the active inductor by adjusting the current drawn by M7,8,9,10 subsequently the transconductances of M2,3,5,6 . Leq = 2(Cgs3 + Cgs2 ) gds1 (3 IDS3 + 2 IDS2 gds1 ) (6)

2098

100

Compensated

Phase Noise (dBc/Hz)

Frequency (GHz)

110

Uncompensated

120

0.5

0.7 Tuning Voltage (V)

0.9

1.1

0.7

0.9

1.1

1.3

1.5

Tuning Voltage (V)

Fig. 4.

Dependence of the oscillation frequency of VCO on Vb1 .

Fig. 6. Effect of the negative resistance network M9,10 on the phase noise of VCO.

where 2 and 3 are the transconductance parameters of M2 W and M3 given by 2,3 = 2n Cox . Fig.5 shows the L 2,3 dependence of oscillation frequency of VCO on Vb2 .

Q=

(Cgs3 + Cgs2 )(2gm3 + gm2 gds1 ) (gm3 + gm2 )(gds1 gm3 ) + 2 (Cgs3 + Cgs2 )2

(7)

2.1

It becomes evident that the quality factor of the active inductor is dependent of (i) the biasing condition of the active inductor and (ii) the frequency tuning voltages Vb1,b2 . Fig.7 shows the dependence of the phase noise of the oscillator on Vb2
10um

Frequency (GHz)

1.9

10um

2um 1.7

100

500nm

2um

500nm 1.5

Phase Noise (dBc/Hz)

110

0.9

1.1 Control Voltage (V)

1.3

1.5

Fig. 5.

Dependence of the oscillation frequency of VCO on Vb2 .

120

The additional bias current from M7,8 will not ow through the negative resistance network of M11,12 . This will reduce the quality factor of the oscillator subsequently increase the phase noise. To reduce the phase noise performance dependency on the additional bias current a second negative resistance network M9,10 is added. D. Quality Factor The quality factor of the active inductor ultimately sets the overall quality factor of the VCO. The quality factor of the active inductor can be obtained from the ratio of the imaginary part of the impedance of the active inductor to the real part of the impedance.

0.6

1.4

Control Voltage (Volts)

Fig. 7.

Dependence of the phase noise of VCO on Vb2 .

III. S IMULATION R ESULTS The proposed VCO was designed and implemented in TSMC-0.18m 1.8V 6-metal 1-poly CMOS technology. The layout of the VCO is shown in Fig.8. The output is buffered with an open drain PMOS matched to 50 for wafer probe measurements. The oscillator was analyzed using SpectreRF from Cadence Design Systems with BSIM3V3 device models. The output of the VCO is shown in Fig.9 with a nearly full rail to rail swing.

2099

110

Phase Noise (dBc/Hz)

114

118

122

100K

1M

10M

Frequency (Hz)

Fig. 8.

Layout of VCO.

Fig. 10.

Simulated phase noise of VCO.

1.6

1.2

Voltage (V)

0.8

0.4

0.2

0.6

Time (ns)

Fig. 9.

Waveform of the output voltage of VCO.

Fig. 11.

Microphoto of VCO.

The simulated phase noise of the VCO is shown in Fig.10 with the VCO tuned to 1.6 GHz. It is seen that the phase noise is -118.5 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz frequency offset. The power consumption of the VCO is 45 mW. The micro-photo of the fabricated VCO is shown in Fig.11. IV. C ONCLUSIONS A new active inductor LC-tank voltage-controlled oscillator with an ultra wide frequency tuning range has been presented. It has been shown that the large frequency tuning range of the VCO is obtained by varying the inductance of the active inductor. Two inductance tuning mechanisms, namely the wide-band tuning mechanism for coarse frequency adjustment over a large frequency range for band selection and the primary tuning mechanism for the ne frequency tuning in frequency synthesis, have been proposed. The oscillator occupies a small active area of 85 50 m2 due to the absence of spiral inductors. The wide-band tuning mechanism provides

a frequency tuning range from 0.2 GHz to 6.5 GHz while the primary tuning mechanism provides a frequency range from 1.4 GHz to 1.7 GHz when the center frequency of the oscillator is set to 1.6 GHz. The phase noise with the VCO tuned to 1.6 GHz is -118.5 dBc/Hz at 1 MHz frequency offset. R EFERENCES
[1] A. Thanachayanont and A. Payne, CMOS oating active inductor and its applications to band-pass lter and oscillator design, IEE Proc. Part G. - Circuits, Devices, and Systems, Vol. 147, No. 1, pp.42-48, Feb. 2000. [2] Y. Wu, M. Ismail, and H. Olsson, CMOS VHF/RF CCO based on active inductors, IEE Electronics Letters, Vol. 37, No. 8, pp.472-473, Apr. 2001. [3] M. Grozing, A. Pascht, and M. Berroth, A 2.5 V CMOS differential active inductor with tunable L and Q for frequencies up to 5 GHz, in Proc. IEEE Radio Freq. Integrated Circuits Symp., pp. 271-274, 2001. [4] F. Mahmoudi and C. Salama, 8 GHz tunable CMOS quadrature generator using differential active inductors, in Proc. IEEE Intl Symp. Circuits Syst., vol.3, pp.2112-2115, May 2005. [5] L. Lu, H. Hsieh, and Y. Liao, A Wide Tuning-Range CMOS VCO With a Differential Tunable Active Inductor,IEEE Trans. Microwave Theory and Techniques,vol.3, pp.3462-3468, Sept. 2006.

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