Millimeter-wave CMOS circuit design

We have developed a 27- and 40-GHz tuned amplifier and a 52.5-GHz voltage-controlled oscillator using 0.18-mum CMOS. The line-reflect-line calibrations with a microstrip-line structure, consisting of metal1 and metal6, was quite effective to extract the accurate S-parameters for the intrinsic transistor on an Si substrate and realized the precise design. Using this technique, we obtained a 17-dB gain and 14-dBm output power at 27 GHz for the tuned amplifier. We also obtained a 7-dB gain and a 10.4-dBm output power with a good input and output return loss at 40 GHz. Additionally, we obtained an oscillation frequency of 52.5 GHz with phase noise of -86dBc/Hz at a 1-MHz offset. These results indicate that our proposed technique is suitable for CMOS millimeter-wave design.